Branding vs. Marketing vs. Communications
If you want to get notified of new posts, click HERE
It can be confusing out there, where branding is confused with marketing and communications don’t even get mentioned.
Full transcript:
Is branding a part of marketing? Is communications helping with your branding? There's a lot of confusion out there about what is branding, marketing, and communications. When you think about how a business makes it money, there is the cost of its products and service. There is a price that's sold at and between those is the profit. Now the ultimate goal of branding is to increase perceived value. And you can capture that value, whether it's increasing the price. So you have new profit or more profit, or you can get more share of the market. In order for us to define and clarify what is branding, marketing communications. We have to start from the beginning.
What is a brand? What is branding? Brand is a perception and feeling anybody has about your product service or even a person. In other words, everything has a brand. Now branding, that's the intentional process of creating and making that feeling across every single touchpoint. In other words, branding is everything. In fact, when you consider the process of branding, there's six different pieces and components to it.
The first one is research, that's really diving in understanding what your audience needs are and coming out with truths.
The second piece of it it's strategy. Once you understand your audiences, you can create a brand strategy to really hone in on the truths and the positioning, the personality of your brand.
The third piece is design. It's getting into the, the artwork, the verbals, the voice, and, and all that to kind of bring that to life.
The fourth piece is to activate, put it out in the marketplace or launch it within your company for your employees.
The fifth piece is measurement. Making sure that you measure, you understand what's working, what's not working well, lending you to tweak or change some of the activations.
So now that we understand brand and branding, let's see how marketing communication plays its role. So you might see out there Venn diagrams of marketing and branding. Most of the time, communications are left out. But when you really look at it, marketing and communications, they are a part of branding because if branding is every single touch point, marketing and communications sit within that. We've gone through what the goal of branding overall is. But the goal of marketing as to drive sales, it's conversions, it's funnels. It's doing what it takes to get the word out to your potential customers, get them into their system, get them into the funnel, convert them into customers and through loyalty programs continue to engage them. So they become lifelong customers. Now that's marketing. Now for communications, the goal is to increase reputation. The tactics and channels might blend and blur with marketing as they get into paid ads, whether it's social or sponsored content. But the goal of communications is to really increase that reputation
In a recent survey on LinkedIn, I asked who owns branding and 78% of respondents said, it's all employees. It's true, every employee needs to own branding because they need to be advocates for the brand. But 12% of respondents said it is the CMO or CCO. And 10% says it's the CEO, which then lies to a conundrum. If everyone owns it, nobody owns it. And so when you think about the confusion in branding, marketing communications, it's really about how organizations are structured. Typically organizations are not structured in a way to pull through the definition of branding, where branding is everything. So who really owns branding? Who does sales and marketing and communications and all those different functions report up to? It's the CEO. And so the CEO needs to be a strong proponent of this idea. That branding is everything. Even though everyone needs to be a steward, who really pushes and makes sure that the brand permeates throughout organization, sometimes it is the CEO, but sometimes there can be an interim or different layer. Maybe it's the chief operating officer. But regardless of that, what is important to note is that marketing and communications both contribute to branding because branding is every interaction and touchpoint. Now you might ask, what about customer service? What about sales? Yes. They are a part of branding. Anything that interacts with the audiences you're trying to influence, whether it's a customer as a prospect or a potential recruit for the company is part of branding.
Before we conclude, the sixth thing, you thought I forgot that didn't you, it's governance. Besides research, strategy, design, activation, measurement, governance is the last but really important piece to hold it all together. It's the people, it's the process to make sure this is a well-oiled machine. You never want your delights and your wows to be accidental. You want them to be intentional, build it into a system and govern it so that you can deliver the promise again and again and again, that's brand building. And so this is where the brand council comes in. Every company needs to have a brand council, and this includes all the different heads of functions, of all those that touches the audiences in terms of brand, but also think about a crucial component of this, which is your HR. You need all leaders to be infused into the brand so that they can bring it to life across all.
Ways I can help you
Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands
Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)