Marketing v. Branding

There is a particular kind of vocabulary within the marketing world, but what exactly does the word “marketing” mean? The word alone always seems to be such a big, all-encompassing term. It often gets used interchangeably with so many other terms. 

Certainly some of this stems from the classic tension among marketing professionals that is especially evident between the idea of “marketing” and that of “sales.” These two branches are interdependent: marketing drives the interest that results in sales, and sales executes the actual transactions that marketing initiated. When the organization underperforms, the office of marketing wonders why sales can’t close more deals but the office of sales wonders why the office of marketing can’t bring them more leads. 

It's more productive to consider the various aspects of marketing because even the typical framework above is a false dichotomy. If “marketing” is the effort to promote or sell a specific product (or service, or identity, or idea, etc.), then everything contributing to that effort falls somewhere underneath the marketing umbrella. We make a more informative contrast between “identity” and “promotion.” Identity is what we are—it is what we are offering or what we do. Promotion is how we get that in front of everyone we want to take advantage of what we have to offer. In other words, aside from “everyone!!” (obviously…), where can we find those people and how can we grow? These two concepts, identity and promotion, have different fundamental purposes.

At the highest level, most org charts indicate which of those two is preeminent in the sense that it needs to come first. The power and authority to protect the brand is focused among the “marketing staff,” particularly the chief marketing officer. They are considered the brand stewards (or occasionally less flattering things by those in other parts of the organization who feel throttled by their protective efforts!). On the other hand, this is also evident in the reason for being (the literal “raison d’être”) of the entire organization: If you don’t have a product or identity, what are the sales staff even selling? Can you have a brand or image without promotion or sales? That’s certainly a possibility; however the converse is not true: You can’t really sell nothing (although Jon Agee would disagree, as he famously illustrated in his book Nothing!). 

When we talk about the brand—regardless of the term that we’re using (image, perception, etc.)—we’re talking about the very identity of the entire organization and everything that it stands for. Just about everything else actually derives from the brand. If an effort does not contribute positively to the brand perception, it undermines everything about the organization, including the sales effort itself. If an effort does contribute positively to the brand perception, it’s at least worth consideration. Then at that point it becomes a question of allocation of scarce resources (opportunity cost, maximizing opportunity, etc.). When viewed this way, those protection efforts seem a lot less internally malevolent and actually helpful. 

Promotion then is the act of growing awareness of… purchase of… involvement with… that particular thing. This becomes more inclusive of most of all the rest of the “marketing” terms we use! It also becomes a lot easier to envision these because they are less ideas (like “branding”) and more actions or efforts. They include:

• Things you do: sales, campaigns, lead generation…

• Ways you do it: recruitment, public relations, franchise…

• Things you create: logo, symbol, icon…

Note of course that things you create can easily cross over into the other camp where the image itself is part of the brand or identity. Thus, the creation or establishment of that image is part of the actual promotion. 

So, which of these does “marketing” refer to? Obviously Marketing (capital-M) means both of these things, but it is easy to see how marketing (lower-case-m) tends to mean the set of activities in this latter group.