I often hear marketing professionals bantering the terms “branding,”
“marketing” and “advertising.” The same is true of the terms “campaign,” “strategic,”
and “tactical.” In many cases, seasoned professional use the first three terms interchangeably
as if they all mean the exact same thing. In fact, these six terms are often misused,
confused ― or worse, they’re associated with unscrupulous means of conning people
out of their money. In this article, we’ll explore the meaning and use of these
six often misused terms. We’ll see if and when they overlap, and I’ll provide concrete
examples to create a clear distinction between the six terms wherever possible.
So get ready to eliminate the myths and misunderstanding these terms often carry.
When I looked up the definition of a “brand” or “branding,” I found
more than 50 answers to my query. One article provided 30 different definitions for the word “branding” alone. The same
is true for “marketing” and “advertising.” Some of the online dictionaries also
overlap their meanings as well. For example, here is a fairly straight-forward definition
of “branding” from the businessdictionary.com:
“The process involved in creating
a unique name and image for a product in the consumers' mind, mainly through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme. Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated
presence in the market that attracts and retains
loyal customers.”
I like this definition except for the fact that it should say marketing
instead of advertising campaigns.
Where did Branding Come From?
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If you substitute the term “brand” with the words “value” or “reputation,”
you come close to
the true meaning and implications of the word. On the other hand,
branding is the process of creating a
brand. A brand is created from all the activities
that are related to and/or surrounding a company, product, service, group or individual.
A “brand,” therefore, is a dynamic reality. It evolves over time, based on consumer experience,
news (good and bad), marketing, and other activities that a company, group or individual
engages in. In other words, a “brand” per se isn’t static (although it’s the goal
of most companies to make their brand positive and unchanging if at all possible).
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Therefore, a “brand” is what consumers and the general public perceive
as the value, reputation and contribution of a company, product, service, group
or individual to the world as a whole. A brand can be considered great, good, mediocre
or even bad.
Brand vs. Branding
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“Branding” usually involves creating and using a consistent theme,
logo, and corporate color schemes across all marketing and advertising platforms.
These themes (their “look and feel,” so to speak) then become associated with the
brand itself, that is, the perceived value of the company, product or service. An
example of this transformation is when a logo like IBM replaces the actual company
name (which was International Business Machines) and becomes the only corporate
identity for that company.
Then There's Rebranding
Today you’ll often hear the term, “rebranding” used when companies
feel they need to
change consumers’ sentiment of their brand (i.e., a good reputation soiled by some event which changed consumer
perceived value and or contribution). For example when BP had the oil spill in the Gulf, consumer sentiment went
negative… BP Oil has sense run many TV campaigns designed to show them as an environmentally
and Gulf community friendly company by showing all they are doing to help that area
recover from the spill. Another example is J.C. Penny
changing their name and logo after what seems like an eternity to JCP. They soon
changed it again because of consumer backlash. It has even changed several times
more in the four years since the first changed to JCP. I guess you could say they
have an identity/brand crisis.
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If you’re a small company, you have a very limited brand identification
and your branding efforts are also somewhat limited. That is, unless you have a
substantial following/fan base, then you usually have a limited local or regional
brand, at best. This is especially true if you aren’t using a consistent logo, color
scheme, or slogan for all your marketing, advertising and public relations efforts.
Many startups create an initial brand theme and then quickly eliminate or change
it before it was ever solidly identified with their company, product or service.
On top of that, changing any element diminishes your branding efforts. For example,
switching colors on your logo, (even if it’s two very similar colors), using different
fonts for the company’s name, etc., diminish the brand. At this stage of the game
your perceived reputation, value to the community and consumer sentiment is your
actual brand. Not your logo, color scheme of other created visual elements.
So What is Marketing?
Now let’s take a closer look at the many definitions of “marketing”
from the various authorities. I like the definition of marketing from the American Marketing
Association: “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions,
and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings
that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
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Here’s another definition of “marketing” from Investopedia.com: “The activities of a company associated with
buying and selling a product or service. It includes advertising, selling and delivering
products to people. People who work in marketing departments of companies try to
get the attention of target audiences by using slogans, packaging design, celebrity
endorsements and general media exposure. The four 'Ps' of marketing are product,
place, price and promotion.”
There are many more definitions of “marketing,” but many are
somewhat “circular” in that they mix marketing and advertising in the same sentence
without fully clarifying the relationship between the two. For the most part, “marketing”
is used to create a brand, as we defined it above. It’s far more comprehensive than
“advertising.” One’s marketing plan usually dictates one’s advertising campaigns.
Advertising is usually an element of a
comprehensive marketing plan. Marketing encompasses
all the planning and research activity to determine what kinds of ads will be run,
what they’ll say, when and where they’ll be placed, and what demographics they’ll
target. It also encompasses things like packaging, shipping, customer experience,
product display, and customer perception, as well as market research. Marketing
can be considered as an overarching process that focuses on organizing, implementing
and managing specific elements of a branding campaign.
Advertising vs. Marketing
“Advertising” then, is a specific tactic of marketing. It usually
entails specific media such as newspaper, TV, radio, the Internet, billboards or
other specialty advertising, all designed to target specific markets. The reason
the two words ― marketing and advertising ― are often confused is because many small
companies don’t engage in marketing, they engage in advertising with minimal or
no marketing involved (i.e., little or no research, planning, organizing or testing).
To make things worse, many advertising representatives use the word “marketing”
in their sales pitch when they’re actually selling advertising. This confuses the branding, marketing and advertising processes
altogether. I perceive the difference between marketing and advertising as follows:
If you’re engaging in a single, or just a few advertising elements, and very little
research, testing, or strategic planning went into the decision, then you’re just
doing advertising. That’s OK if it works for you. On the other hand, if it’s not
working, then it may be time to invest is some marketing that includes research, testing, and strategic planning to
create an effective, results-oriented advertising campaign.
What's The Difference Between Strategic and Tactical
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“Tactical” normally referrals to individual elements of an overall
strategic plan or campaign. For example, when we, as an award-winning marketing
company, design a campaign for a client, we first research what their current Internet
search ranking is, what kind of social media presence they have, what’s the level
of their followers’ engagement, how many fans do they have, and also assess what
their top three competitors are doing. That’s the marketing part.
Creating a Strategic Plan
Once this analysis is complete, we create a strategic, one-year plan
that includes adding any missing infrastructure elements that are needed (i.e.,
landing pages, testimonial videos, missing social networks, etc.). We also generate
a comparative score for them and their top three competitors, and we assemble a
list of the top six Internet processes they need to be engaged in (such as on-page
search optimization, social networking, blogging, videos, conversion elements and
followers’ engagement). This report also states how well they’re are doing with
regards to these elements.
This analysis also tells us and the client what kind of advertising
elements to include in their marketing campaign. It show us who to target and how
we can attack the weakness of their competitors. In other words, if their competition
isn’t blogging, or they have few videos on YouTube, or they aren’t active in the
top five social nets, we know these are areas where we can outperform them. This
provides us with an opportunity to exploit the competitors’ weaknesses in these
particular areas.
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I have covered a lot of information in this article. I hope it has
helped you on your journey to profitability. If you found this article useful, share
it with your colleagues, friends, and family. If you have a comment about this article, leave
it in the Comment section below.
In this article, I discussed the meaning and relationships between
the words, “branding, “marketing” and “advertising,” along with a few other miss
used business terms, so that any business can understand and then utilize these
processes to benefit and grow. I provided concrete, real-life examples of how these
words relate to each other, so that any business can maximize their “branding, “marketing”
and “advertising” efforts.
You can find more than a dozen articles about marketing and
internet advertising by entering “marketing” or “advertising” in
the search box, at the top of this blog. I also recommend reading the “Seven Habits of Highly Successful Internet Marketers,”
“How to Get Fish to Jump in The Boat - A Social
Media Analogy,” “The Evolution of Internet Advertising,”
and “Making Sense of Online Marketing,” just
to name a few. Thanks for sharing your valuable time.
That's my opinion, I look forward to hearing yours.
If you'd like a free copy of our eBook, "Internet Marketing Tips for the 21st Century," please fill in the form below and we'll email it to you. Your information is always kept private and is never sold.
Hector Cisneros is
COO and director of Social Media Marketing at Working the Web to Win, an award-winning Internet
marketing company based in Jacksonville, Florida. He
is also co-host of the weekly Internet radio show, "Working the Web To Win" on BlogTalkRadio.com,
which airs every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Hector is a
syndicated writer and published author of “60 Seconds to Success.” And the co-author or “Working The Web to Win.”
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Well at least now I know I am not alone in confusing these terms and concepts. Thanks for helping to clarify this. With clarity, it is easier to see the path to success.
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