Branding vs. Marketing - What’s the Difference?
For those who do not come from this area of expertise, it can be very confusing to know the actual difference between branding and marketing.
Especially as a new business owner, our main focus is customers and make sales quickly. For this reason, we put a lot of emphasis on marketing because that's what we are either told or what we learned in business school.
As an experienced brand strategist for small businesses, I can tell you that if you are starting your business to be successful in the long run, starting with branding is a good idea.
Before we dive deep into the topic, let’s clarify the difference between Branding and Marketing:
Branding vs. Marketing - A Summary
Ideally, branding happens before marketing. It is the process of creating the foundation of a brand and includes thought processes to answer questions like:
What makes me different to my competition?
What is my unique selling point?
What do I value as a business?
What do I want to achieve as a business?
Who are our target audience/clients? Which problems do I solve?
It ends with the process of pulling the strategic part into a brand identity, which is often referred to as brand design.
Once the branding process is done, marketing takes over and is there to “market” your brand and makes sure people find out about it.
The below graphic perfectly illustrates the differences and what the term includes:
Let’s dive a bit deeper. Let’s clarify what both terms actually mean:
What is Branding?
Branding is about giving meaning to a company, its products or services by creating emotion and identity. It's about understanding how a company, product or service stands out from the competition. This includes naming, logo design, colours, and the overall visual appearance of a brand.
Sounds pretty complicated, right? Let me break it down for you:
Branding involves three main components that take time and repetition.
These three components are:
Developing your Brand Strategy
Development of your Brand identity / Brand Design
Development of your visual presence and anything that visually represents your brand or business, including marketing materials (website, business cards, social media graphics).
Let’s start with the first one: Brand Strategy.
By developing your unique brand strategy, you will become clear on why your company exists and who it is for, what values your company follows in its behaviour, and what differentiates its products and services from those of competitors in its market.
Developing your brand strategy will give you guidance on what to do and absolute clarity on what your business stands for as a brand and provides guidance on how to bring this to life visually.
Develop your own and aligned Brand Strategy in 5 simple steps
Learn what brand strategy is and how to develop your own Brand Strategy to set up your business for success and attract your ideal clients and gain clarity on your plan and next steps to develop your brand.
The next step is to design your brand design - also called brand identity.
It includes your brand’s logo, colours, fonts, textures, graphics etc. This part of the branding process aligns your strategy with what people see when they interact with your brand.
This means, if you or your brand designer have done their work well, your strategy aligns with your visuals in a way that is matches what attracts your ideal client you as a brand want to serve. The relevant components are your brand logo, brand colours, fonts, textures, imagery, and graphics. It should all be shown and displayed in your brand style guide, which keeps all the necessary colour codes, font names and graphics in one place to ensure you stay on brand when you use them on your website, business cards, social media channels or any other marketing materials.
Once you are done with that, you can start to apply your brand design in your marketing materials.
A fully aligned branding process incorporates the design of website, business cards or social media graphics to ensure all marketing materials reflect the brand personality in the right way. And here is where it becomes tricky for lots of people to draw the line between branding and marketing. Because the marketing materials - shouldn’t they be part of the marketing?
It depends. There will be marketers who work on marketing materials as well, but the essence of your brand design should not be changed with another advertising or campaign, but remain intact to keep your brand recognition up. It is more so, that once the core of your marketing materials are set up, marketers can use instruments, campaigns and tools to promote your brand/business and its services or products.
🤓 Like to learn more about branding? 👉 Check out this article
What is Marketing?
Marketing is the summary of all the activities your business undertakes to promote the sale of its products or services.
So now that you have done your groundwork with brand strategy and brand design, you can start marketing your business. This includes advertising, search engine optimisation (SEO), promotions like giveaways, campaigns, and so on.
Because there are so many different way to market your business, marketing is described as the sum of all activities. However, it is important that you first define who you want to reach as your ideal customer with your brand or business, and then develop a marketing and content strategy based on that.
“In summary, branding is the process of creating the foundations of your business, including what your brand is, what it stands for and what it looks like, while marketing is the promotional activities that ensure potential customers see that result.”
Branding answers the "w-questions”:
Why does our company or brand exist?
What do we value?
What is our personality like?
Why are we different from others in the market?
Who is our ideal client?
Marketing answers "how" questions, for example:
How can we reach our potential customers?
How can we measure various efforts?
How can we improve our activities?
You can think of your branding as the core or essence of your brand that defines your brand’s purpose, vision and values. It defines who your brand serves and what it’s unique selling proposition is, the brand’s personality and in what tone or brand voice it speaks to its customers. It also defines what the brand looks like with its logo, fonts, colours and visual elements.
Once you are clear on what your business is about, what it stands for and how it looks, you develop activities and determine how your ideal customers can find you (that's marketing). Your marketing decides whether you want to market your brand online, offline or both, how much money and time to spend on which platform or event, how much you want to spend on which advertising and how to create campaigns that work for your brand in a way that it reaches the most ideal clients possible.
🤓 Like to learn more about marketing? 👉 Check out this article about mastering marketing as a small business
How do I align Branding and Marketing?
Integrating your brand strategy and brand design with your marketing is incredibly important to make your brand work for you. The branding process and marketing efforts your brand takes should go hand in hand and work seamlessly.
I know brand strategy and branding is often overlooked by small businesses because most new business owners really just get the business running and increase revenue to pay costs for starting the business. However, professional branding has become more important over the years and brands that look “off” are considered unprofessional. With website visitors forming their opinion on your websites in only 0.05 seconds, all great marketing efforts won’t help you if website visitors leave your website immediately after entering.
We offer specialised brand strategy and branding services for small businesses to make sure your brand is perceived as professional - and connects emotionally where it counts.
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