The Difference Between Marketing, Advertising and Branding
The internet is awash with expertise. Yet mining that expertise for specific answers often leads to the same problem: answers vary from expert to expert.
Marketing and branding are two areas where experts fail to present us with consistent answers to simple questions. What’s branding? The School of Visual Arts “helpfully” provides you with 100 different definitions from 100 different experts. With expertise like that who needs novices?
Brand expert Denise Lee Yohn recently tried her hand at differentiating advertising from branding by defining the terms, along with closely related words like marketing.
Her article is a good starting point for a beginner, but I think several of her definitions are in need of improvement, and the two most important words — brand and branding — are defined inaccurately.
Denise defines marketing as:
The process of developing, promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service.
This is nearly perfect. Note that developing the product is included here. Products must be developed with the participation of marketers or, even better, at the direction of marketing. A marketing department uninvolved in product development is a mere promotion department.
But one important piece is missing from this definition. Marketing is the process of developing, promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service to a target audience.
Without knowing who your marketing efforts are geared towards you can’t effectively market. Every action must be undertaken with the target customer in mind.
Which brings us to advertising:
Advertising — A form of marketing communication used to persuade an audience.
Denise clarifies the difference between advertising and marketing this way: “Marketing is the big picture; advertising is a discrete effort.”
This, again, is a great definition. Note that the goal is to persuade an audience, which is why identifying the target audience must be included in the definition of marketing! Someone has to define the target.
What happens when the audience isn’t clearly identified by marketing?
Ad agencies will create a viral ad, an ad known by all, an ad destined for the pantheon of great advertising, an ad that…will eventually get the agency fired.
The ¡Yo Quiero Taco Bell! dog was one such ad.
The ad secured superstardom and worldwide recognition for the Chihuahua and object of its obsession, Taco Bell. But it failed to do one important thing: persuade people to buy more Taco Bell.
In 1999, two years after the Taco Bell dog’s debut, Taco Bell’s 5-year US growth rate was -1%. In the second quarter of 2000 Taco Bell experienced the largest same-store sales decline in its history.
So what did they do? The ditched their $200-million dollar advertising account and focused on marketing. They developed products to appeal to their audience and promoted to that audience.
Their audience cared about value and access to food at odd hours. So they promoted late night hours, snacking (Fourth Meal), and the low price. Instead of focusing on a dog they focused on the quality and taste of their food. The customer wanted more options so Taco Bell promoted new product after inventive new product and now attempts to launch 8 to 10 new products a year.
As a result Taco Bell’s growth rate in 2014 was 4%. And it’s not just sales, customer satisfaction as measured by ACSI has also increased:
Sales increases and decreases can be sometimes be explained away as beyond the chain’s control given fast-food customers’ fickle tastes and slavish response to fad diets. But satisfaction is a clear metric of success. Taco Bell did something to satisfy customers since ditching their spokesdog. What was it?
Do you think Taco Bell’s actual product quality has changed appreciably in that time frame? Have they really gone from “Taco Hell” to a purveyor of quality food stuffs? No. They haven’t. What changed is Taco Bell deliberately positioning its product to appeal to a specific audience. That audience is more satisfied as a result.
This is why branding is so important. Branding influences customers’ perceptions and those perceptions drive measurable and longer-lasting results than any one ad campaign can.
Aligning all touch points around the perception to be created is the essence of branding, which moves us to the definitions Denise gets wrong.
Brand — The bundle of values and attributes that describe the unique value a company, product, or service delivers to customers, and the unique way of doing business that distinguishes its relationships with customers and other stakeholders.
The is far too wordy to be an effective definition. While close to accurate, it allows a novice to come away without understanding the most important fact about brands. A brand is a perception of a company, product or service. It’s not a bundle of things; it’s one thing, a perception.
Like all perceptions, brands live in the mind. They aren’t tangible, physical things. In fact, their intangibility is what makes them so powerful. Brand experts and journalists do the public a great disservice using brand as a synonym for company. The company is not the brand. The company is the company; the brand is the perception of the company.
Once you understand that a brand is a perception then branding becomes an easy to understand action.
Here’s Denise’s take on branding:
Branding — The development and use of symbols like logos to convey the identity of a company, product, or service.
This definition is far off base, though, to be fair, it has etymological accuracy.
Historically a brand was a distinct mark burned on animals with a branding iron to identify them. Sadly this practice extended to human property, such as slaves and criminals, as well. This is the root meaning of branding and in its most crude form can still be applicable today (e.g. “Our branded notepads.”)
But branding is not just about claiming ownership over a message by slapping a logo on it.
A brand is a perception, so branding is the creation or influence of a perception.
Branding is not claiming ownership over a message by slapping a logo on it.
A company who thinks their logo is their brand is in for a rude awakening. The brand is the perception living in a customer’s mind. That perception is influenced by every aspect of the company, including the name and logo. All touch points must align with the perception the company wants to create.
This is why some experts, like Al Reis, will tell you that marketing is branding. If a brand will be influenced based on the product, the promotion, the placement and price, then the brand builder —the person responsible for creating the perception — must oversee them all.
What differentiates the brand builder and marketer is the former’s ownership over the perception to be created. When an organization lacks brand-building leadership, especially if the CEO doesn’t understand that the end goal of branding is to create a perception, marketers move the company forward aimlessly from one product or promotion to the next. The customer never files the company away as a brand, or if they do the company guts the established meaning by launching a product that doesn’t align with it.
The role of the brand builder is to know what the end perception will be. They then utilize a bevy tools, from marketing to advertising, to create it. Once created the brand builder ensures that the perception remains accurate, alive, and strong in the customer’s mind.
It doesn’t take an expert to tell you this. Just look inside your mind at all the brands you’ve already filed away. Someone put those perceptions there. Here’s a hint: It wasn’t an advertiser or marketer.
Denise has several more useful definitions in her article.
Read the whole thing.
