Branding, Marketing, and Advertising: Learn the Differences

1. What is Marketing?

To define it broadly, marketing is the business’s methods of researching, planning, and executing how it promotes itself and its products to its target audience. It is a key component of the management of any business; without it, no one will even know that your company exists. Not only that but also marketing processes should actually proceed the launch of your company.

By definition, marketing consists of several components and processes, two of which are branding and advertising. But that is not all that is there for it. Marketing comprises research – which should precede all the other parts – it should even precede launching your company itself.

Market research aims at studying your target market to assess it overall, its components and the factors including your target audience, their needs and expectations, your competitors, what they offer, what they excel at and what they lack (strengths and weaknesses), and many other factors.

This is key to determine your SWAT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and which need you should focus on satisfying and your competitive advantage and, therefore, your brand identity. This way, you can determine both your Value Proposition (the benefits you are offering your customer) and the Unique Selling Point (what sets you apart from your competitors).

Based on that, the company proceeds to plan its marketing mix, also known as the 12Ps. The marketing mix components are product, price, promotion, place, people, physical evidence, process, proof, portfolio, prestige, performance, and package.

These help you set the overarching guidelines and requirements that your campaigns need to fulfill and how you promote and sell your products to your customers. That being said, we have barely scratched the surface of what marketing is about, but it shows how its scope encompasses many things other than advertising or branding, or even both of them combined.

2. Advertising – the Most Expensive Part of Marketing

All advertising is marketing, but not all marketing is advertising. Advertising is only one part of the marketing strategy, albeit its most costing component; it can be defined as a form of media that aims at increasing brand awareness or promoting or selling a certain product, service, or idea.

Ads could be online- or offline-based; they could be written, auditory or visual or two or more of them combined. In recent years, a new form, interactive ads, started to rise to fame thanks to the technological advances; this has enabled a lot of businesses to create and communicate more personalized messages to their target audience through their ads.

One of the most distinctive features of advertising is that it is usually prompting a specific clear action or immediate response from its audience – known as Call to Action –  such as “buy now!” or “reserve your slot.”

That being said, advertising usually has three objectives: inform, persuade, and remind.

Through informative ads, businesses aim to introduce a new product, service, or explain how they work or how to use it to their target audience. Also, a new business is likely to launch an informative campaign to introduce itself to the market.

As for persuasive ads, as the name clearly suggests, they aim at urging the customers to buy your product or service through emphasizing its features and attributes and why it is better than what your competitors are offering.

A reminder as an objective is not less important than the first two. A brand needs to affirm its placement inside the customer’s mind by reminding him why its products and services are better than the others.

3. Branding – or How to Build an Intangible Giant

We can all agree on the fact that brands are currently the world’s most valuable item – even though they are intangible. As a matter of fact, the value of some brands exceeds the GDP of some developing countries.

Amazon, the online shopping titan, currently sits atop the throne with the value of $315.5bn after replacing Apple whose value is estimated to slightly exceed the $309.5bn mark, making it the runner-up; meanwhile, Google came in third place with $309bn, falling short of Apple by around $500m.

Branding has both a visual and a psychological aspect to it. The visual part is about building a distinctive feature – a visual identity – that your customers can identify you and your products or services through amongst your competitors; this includes setting yourself visually apart from your competitors with tools that include your logo, color palette, typography, packaging, mascot,  and many other visual elements.

Let’s take McDonald’s restaurants for example; they have successfully distinguished themselves visually using their red-and-yellow color palette, the stylized “m” letter logo, and Ronald McDonald the clown.

However, the endgame of branding is essentially about associating yourself with a specific unique value or quality that none of your competitors provide your customers with.

To put it in a more simple manner, branding is the image you want to maintain for your business and products in your customer’s mind; it is to gain their immediate trust once they see your logo on any product or service.

For example, when it comes to cars, the first word that would jump to your head when you hear the word Mercedez is probably luxury, while Volvo got itself associated with safety over many decades.

Perhaps one of the most evident demonstrations of a brand’s success is when its name is used as a synonym for the value it provides. Google, for example, associated itself with the process of “looking things up” so much that it recently got its slot in the dictionary. For these reasons, building a brand has become an essential component of any business’s marketing strategy.

However, the responsibility of building a powerful consistent brand does not fall upon the shoulders of the marketing department alone; all the different functions and departments need to complement and contribute to the image the company is meant to build for itself, be it customer service, sales, production, or any other department.

Even the most brilliant marketing campaign cannot help a poor-quality product; eventually, it is the customer’s overall experience before, during, and after the sale with you that determines how your target audience views you.