Branding vs. Marketing
You don’t put the walls up until you’ve poured the foundation, and you don’t pour the foundation before you’ve graded the lot. Further, none of that happens without first drafting blue prints with precise measurements and direction.
If we won’t build our homes without planning, mapping, vision casting, and intention, why are we marketing our businesses, products, and services – they very thing we’ve poured blood, sweat, tears, and every ounce of our identity into – without out a plan? Without a deeply rooted understanding of what we’re doing and why?
Modern marketing tricks us into believing that anything digital is fast, easy, and the silver bullet for success that your business has been missing all along.
SPOILER ALERT – NOT TRUE!
Don’t be misunderstood, there are many amazing technologies that can propel a brand forward. Marketers have so many great tools like Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Ads, Programmatic Ads, and Social Advertising with absurd abilities to track, measure, and store data. You can hire the best, most expensive interior designer and fill your home with some really beautiful appliances and furniture, but if your foundation starts to cave, none of that fancy stuff matters. It’s the same thing in business. You can use all of these new, shiny tech tools, but if you don’t have the core of your brand determined and articulated, its the same as putting expensive appliances and furniture inside a sinking house.
So we have to stop lumping branding, marketing, and advertising into the same roles with the same vocabulary and expectations. Advertising cannot exist without marketing. Marketing cannot exist without Branding. Therefore, without Branding, neither marketing nor advertising should be part of the conversation.
Advertising is the paid or sponsored promotion of your product, services and brand. Looking at our Branding Bullseye, Advertising is the outside ring. Without looking inward first, there are huge gaping holes in the Advertising strategy.
Marketing is an intentional effort to share your company’s story, products, and services. It’s not only paid, or it doesn’t have to be. It’s not only acquisition based, or it doesn’t have to be. Referencing our Branding Bullseye again, Marketing sits in the middle as a wide array of communicative and promotional efforts such as websites, emails, social media, events and PR. With a strong Marketing strategy and presence, Advertising acts as an add-on for Marketing.
Finally, Branding is at the core, or center, of everything. Branding is the big mommy of them all and seated smack dab in the middle of the bullseye. I’d go as far as saying that Branding is more closely elated to the business operations than it really is to marketing. With Branding you tightly and intentionally intertwine your revenue generating ventures to your intrinsic passions. When done well, strong Branding acts as a compass for all your business decisions. You can measure all the opportunities, ideas, next steps, and conflict resolutions against your brand’s ideals. I like the vocabulary of “voice and vision” to describe Branding.
Branding is what every charismatic, inspirational leader does without realizing it or standardizing it. Which makes it elusive and non-scalable. That’s where I can help.
Knowing, feeling, and believing in a vision and a passions is different than articulating, casting, and coaching a vision; a way of life; a consistent and delicately loved persona.
You might be thinking to yourself… “OK that sounds cool and all, but really what’s the point, Miranda?”
Think about some of the greats – Apple, Starbucks, or Amazon.
Apple doesn’t really sell computers or phones. Instead, Apple actually sells a status, a feeling. Consumers who purchase an Apple device feel part of an exclusive community of Apple users where simplicity and prestigious are at the core. Similarly, Starbucks doesn’t sell a cup a coffee, but rather the experience of coffee. The way a high-value, rich and savory cup of coffee makes you feel. You get the point – I trust you’re all personally aquatinted with Amazon by now that you’d be able to think through what Amazon actually sells apart from having nearly anything you can think of for sale on their platform.
Great brands, the best of the best, don’t build a business and THEN figure out what their why is, or what they’re actually selling. The story comes first. The story is what makes a brand, and a brand is what makes the business more than just another watered down generic. For every entrepreneur or business leader, there’s vision, ideas, goals, hope, dreams, and so much more buzzing around in their mind.
Our brands aren’t typically short on ideas – especially in small businesses (my favorite)! We are, however, short on articulation and effective vision casting. And THAT is what sets brands a part from the competition.
Branding is the corner stone of why you exist, which a unique and beautiful story that you get to expand, embellish, and amplify with your marketing strategy. THIS is where the magic happens.
