Branding and Marketing: How Both Work Together

Ask 10 business owners, and you'll most likely hear 10 different definitions of what the difference is between branding and marketing - or 10 blank stares. Many businesses use the terms branding and marketing interchangeably. As a result, they often invest heavily in one while overlooking the other, leading to inconsistent results and missed opportunities. The confusion comes at a price. Marketing campaigns that lack a sense of consistency, don't build audiences, and don't result in any long-term returns on investment are common amongst businesses that don't know where branding ends and marketing begins.

​Actually, branding and marketing are not competitors. They are a team; each one doing something the other can't. Knowing these differences and how they complement one another is one of the most valuable business frameworks that any business owner or strategist can have.​

The Major Difference: Their Functions

​The biggest difference is this - branding is what you are, and marketing is how you get people. The identity is defined by its brand. The action is propelled by marketing.

Branding: Who You Are

Your values, voice, visual identity, and promise to customers. It's the base, it's slow to build, omnipresent, and is owned before any campaign begins.

Marketing: Effective Ways To Communicate The Information To Others

The campaigns, channel, content, and tactics you employ to create awareness, interest, and conversion. It's the engine: measurable, iterative, and in motion all the time.

Imagine that branding is the personality, values, and reputation of a person. That person is the person who says and does what it takes to attract opportunity; this is the definition of marketing. Marketing can be done without branding; it is a shallow and superficial approach. You can invest in branding without marketing, but no one will ever know what you are doing.

The definition of branding

​Often, people think of branding as a logo and a set of colours. In fact, what those visual elements are is only the tip of the iceberg. A brand is the sum of all perceptions, feelings, and associations an individual has about a firm - and that is influenced by their business card, a hotline operator's voice and tone, the company's packaging, and so much more.

​The 'core' of a brand consists of:

Purpose & values

The values and motivations behind the business, and what it does more than earn a profit.

Voice & tone

The way in which the brand communicates its personality through the language of all touchpoints.

Visual identity

The aesthetic language which communicates 'who you are' before reading the word: Logo, typography, colour system, photography style.

Brand promise

The consistent and predictable customer experience that they will have with the business each time.

Branding takes time and is based on experience. It's not called out, it's felt. The same goes for being an innovative, trustworthy, or customer-oriented company; if it doesn't happen through the customers' experience, it's not part of the brand.

The scope of marketing is defined by its scope.

Marketing is not a passive activity; it is an active, strategic activity that involves reaching the right people at the right time with the right message and inviting them to take a specific action. A brand takes time to build and take time to establish itself; a marketing campaign is dynamic and measurable. It's the place where a business presents to the market, proves what works, and turns heads into dollars.

Marketing is a vast field and a wide variety of communication media:

​Since there are already a growing number of active people on the blogosphere, videosphere, podcast sphere, and guide-sphere, it is inevitable that content will be a part of every marketing plan. Content marketing has become indispensable to every marketing strategy, no matter when we mention blogs, video, podcasts, and guides, or when discussing building up authoritative and organic search traffic.

• Paid advertising - search, social media, display, and programmatic ads, and gives you immediate exposure
• Email marketing - a direct connection to customers or prospects to grow your leads and maintain customer loyalty
• Social media marketing - building a community, branding, and engaging on social media.
• SEO - SEO is all about having an optimized website for search engines and finding the high-intent traffic at scale.
• Partnerships/Influencer Marketing - Through partnerships/influencer marketing, leverage 3rd party audience/credibility for increased reach.

These are all forms of transit. Branding determines what the messaging is, how it communicates the message, the aesthetic, and what the promised benefit is. This is where the partnership becomes transparent.

How do they support each other

Marketing and branding are in a circular relationship-they feed each other. Effective marketing, in turn, creates and enhances the brand.

​If a brand has articulated its values, voice, and visual identity, then the immediate benefit is that all marketing campaigns benefit. Copywriters are writers. Designers have a clear idea of what they want to design. Media buyers have an idea of who they can sell to. Campaigns start quicker, run more effectively, and are more unified across channels. When consumers see the brand from different channels (social post, podcast ad, Google search result), they know it immediately and will have the same impression on each.

​On the other hand, the brand is boosted by effective marketing. As campaigns come and go, they all contribute further to the public perception. Every time a customer has a good experience with a marketing touchpoint - whether that is the piece of content that helps them solve a problem, the ad they remember, or the email they open- each touch adds a little more to that brand's account. And that goodwill can turn into reputation, and reputation is that great, sustainable competitive advantage of the brand.

Where Businesses Go Wrong

The biggest mistake businesses make is putting marketing first before they have an idea of what their brand is. Some businesses do the opposite. Do not do any marketing because they think their brand is good enough on its own. Neither of these ways is good.

When a business spends a lot of money on marketing but does not have a brand, it gets confusing. The messages they send out do not match. The pictures and words they use do not look the same. The people they are trying to reach do not know what the company is about. Not many people buy from them. The company spends money to get people to notice them, but it does not work because they do not have a clear brand that people can like.

On the one hand, a business that puts a lot of time and money into making its brand look good with nice pictures and words, but does not do any marketing, is like a beautiful thing that nobody sees. If a company doesn't have marketing, it is no better than just sitting in the living room telling stories to no one. A business must have a brand and must have marketing so that others know what they do. A brand is what they are; marketing is what tells people that they exist.

Building The Two In Harmony

For people who own businesses and want to make their branding and marketing work, they need to take a straightforward approach. They should start by answering some questions about their brand: Who are they helping? What do they believe in? What kind of experience do they promise to give their customers? What makes them different from others? They should write down these answers in a way that every person on their team and their partners can see them and use them.

​Finally, they would need a marketing strategy to communicate the company's values. Every communication that is made, every piece of content that is produced, and every advert that is launched all need to tie back to the brand values, and the question for every idea should not be "will we get a huge amount of clicks?" but instead "does it represent what we are?"

Bottom Line

Basically, marketing and branding are two very different, non-conflicting things, and work together quite well. Marketing drives company growth, and branding provides companies with a purpose. It is the companies that are aware of the relationship between marketing and branding and put time and effort into developing both that win beyond single advertising campaigns.