Let me ask you.
What’s more important, food or water?
There’s no right answer to this question because one thing complements the other and vice versa. That’s the beauty of two aspects coexisting in a system. This is exactly what happens when we tend to discuss the importance of branding or marketing. They both are equally important and can be defined as subparts of one another. But before we dive deep into the importance of both branding and marketing, let us have a brief distinction between both of them to understand what marketing and branding are in their true sense.
Branding Strategy
Branding is all about furnishing an identity of a product or service in relation to its brand name in such a way that it becomes recognizable in the market and relevant to its target audience. It provides a unique identity and persona to the business, establishing its name, symbol, design, and other crucial attributes such as font, logo, typography, imagery, and tagline.
The whole concept behind investing in branding is to carve a strong business perception and foster audience engagement and association with the underlying product or service offered by the brand. A detailed breakdown of the branding would be:
Distinct identity: creating a consistent message that reflects the true vision of an organization for which it stands and announces the brand’s values and unique selling points.
Building a perception: developing a recurring positive memory that just stays with the target audience.
Verbal and visual elements: This is the part that most people confuse as the entire branding operation, which is to develop a name, tagline, logo, typography, imagery, color palette, and the overall visual style of the brand.
Building trust and loyalty: A lot of traction and positive brand positioning can be with the type of content and ad campaigns run by the brand, which induce a feeling of trust and loyalty.
Standing out from the crowd: The one thing that branding helps companies achieve is to create an individual identity that allows them to stand out from the crowd and create their own position in the market.
Marketing Strategy
Now, if we go by the bookish language, the simple definition of marketing is to distribute and promote products and services to drive sales and create their value in the marketplace. If we look closely, there is not a single mention of branding in this definition.
The reason is simple: marketing is done of a product irrespective of whether it's appropriately branded or not.
Let me give you a simple example.
Have you ever had those plain salted potato chips that you sometimes see in the display from a local vendor?
Yes, you are imagining them exactly the way they are packaged. No name or label, just wrapped up in a simple transparent plastic packaging.
Compared to those, have you ever had Lays?
Of course you had. Yes, the popular chips brand. It comes in over 20 flavors and can be found anywhere in the market.
Come on now, tell me the difference between the local chips and Lays.
The difference is simple: one is only marketed, but the other one is branded and then marketed.
What difference does it make?
Well, to start with, if you can’t find the local chips, you don’t know its brand name, its logo, or its identity, but with Lays, you can ask and explain to the shopkeeper in a dozen different ways.
Now, we know taste is subjective, but when you buy Lays, you associate with a certain class of people and like to be seen that way. Additionally, you can order Lays online and through multiple grocery apps, which we believe is not the case with the local chips.
Another prominent aspect is loyalty and trustworthiness. You remain loyal to the brand in spite of the price hike. At the same time, you trust Lays to be a healthy, safe chip, most importantly a packaged product that you can eat, whereas a non-branded local chip has notions and stigmas attached to it, and you’ll be advised not to consume it.
Branding Strategy vs Marketing Strategy
At the risk of sounding AI-phrased, here is a one-liner that I thought of that definitely draws the key distinction between marketing and branding strategy.
“Marketing approaches, but branding invites.”
Yes, that’s the one line that says it all. I could have written a boring and lengthy blog that had the usual subheadings, pointers, and bland examples, but I prefer to share this knowledge in a more personal and compact way of expressing my key thoughts about marketing and branding strategy.
Marketing strategy is all about making the approach, distributing, and driving sales, but branding goes for creating an identity and attracting the right people. People who find the brands valuable and want to buy them and be associated with them.
Another important aspect of both is that each has its own role to play when it comes to promoting the company or product. A well-marketed product is the outcome of a good marketing strategy, but a well-known product is the result of an efficient branding strategy.
End Note
The bottom line remains the same: companies can pretend they do not need both of them, but they actually do, and the brands that successfully create a balance between them hit the bullseye. Both marketing and branding strategies can be learned, explored, and implemented using workshops and knowledge shared by brand consultants and marketing gurus.
There are enough brands in the market that lack substance and clarity, but just because they were well marketed, they penetrate the market at a very deep level. Think about what they will achieve with proper branding strategies applied.
I will only suggest you use the right resources to make the best data-driven decisions and become the master of your product branding as well as marketing.
