Most people confuse marketing with branding and vice versa. This is a common misunderstanding and there is no shame in being part of this group. What matters is that you are here now, and we will help you better understand the differences so you can identify each one correctly!
Let’s begin by learning what marketing and branding are, respectively.
What Is Marketing?
Marketing is a collective of all the strategies and processes your company uses to promote itself and its products and services. It is everything your company is actively doing to connect with customers and prospects to encourage sales of your products and services.
What Is Branding?
Branding is the marketing practice through which you shape the image of your company or ‘brand’. It defines key aspects of your company which are showcased to the public for promotional purposes. To put it simply, branding defines who and what your company is to the market.
Branding includes deciding and clearly defining your company’s name, logo, design, symbol or anything that differentiates your brand from the competition and identifies your products and services to customers.
Now, let’s look at the key differences between marketing and branding.
Differences Between Marketing and Branding
To understand the differences between marketing and branding, it is important to first understand that branding is a part of marketing – it is a marketing strategy. This means that all branding is marketing but not all marketing is branding.
So, what makes marketing and branding different from each other?
1. Branding Comes Before Marketing
Branding is at the very core of your marketing and therefore it comes before you start marketing. Every company must clearly define its brand so that their products and services are identified by their brand. Only then can you effectively market your products and services.
2. Branding Is Forever
Marketing strategies and approaches change over time depending on markets and trends whereas, your branding remains the same forever. You can develop your branding overtime but the key elements of your branding remain unchanged.
3. Grabbing and Retaining Attention
All marketing seeks to grab customer attention but while marketing will grab your customer’s attention, branding will retain their attention over time. You can market products and services for customer attention but your branding creates loyalty and trust that will retain customer attention in the long-run.
4. Marketing Pushes While Branding Pulls
Marketing ‘pushes’ your products and services to customers to drive your sales and branding ‘pulls’ your customers by driving loyalty, trust and recognition among them. Branding allows you to profit from this because it increases your demand and promotes repeat business from customers.
Conclusion
Ultimately, branding is important for marketing and marketing is important for the sales of any company. You need to develop a strong brand and branding strategy to retain customers and develop trust and loyalty among them.
Your marketing may grab their attention to drive sales of your products and services but branding will keep those customers coming back for repeat business. You can also start charging more than your competitors because of the high demand and trust of your brand.
Look at any major brands today, like Apple or Coke – they may market their products for sales but it is their branding that drives customer retention, demand and higher pricing. They can charge more than other smartphone brands or generic sodas because they have built trust and loyalty through branding.
We hope this helped you better understand the differences between marketing and branding.
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