Understanding branding versus marketing

Top 5 Misconceptions of Branding vs. Marketing

Posted by John Seroka on Wed, Oct 23, 2013

  

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Every once in a while I meet with the CEO of a company in the mortgage industry who really understands the importance of building and nurturing a strong brand, but wonders if his internal marketing department knows how to lead a branding effort. Or, they’re not sure that the marketing or public relations agency they work with has the expertise and credentials to assist them in developing their brands.

Developing a brand is a science and requires a very different skill set than that needed for developing a marketing or PR strategy. An agency that has the credentials and specializes in this area will talk with you about your brand up front and learn where it stands before launching into developing a communications strategy as the chasm between marketing and branding is deep and wide.

In order to give your company the life it needs and ensure future growth and sustainability, developing your brand needs to be the first step. Attempting to solve a branding challenge with a marketing or public relations strategy could actually hurt you by furthering an already unstable or weak brand and making it harder and more expensive for you to fix it in the future.

Here are the top five misconceptions marketing and public relations firms may have about developing a brand…

1)    Assuming brand development can be accomplished vis a vis a good marketing and/or public relations strategy.

Brand development is a process by which a company defines who they are, how they’re different and why they exist. This is the basis upon which future marketing and public relations campaigns are launched. Establishing your brand must precede marketing and public relations campaigns, it is not developed simultaneously to developing campaigns.

A successful brand defines who you are as a company…what drives you and why people should care about you and pay attention to you, not just because of a new campaign or enhanced product mix, but because of the emotional value you bring to them. Brand-driven marketing is the only kind of marketing that drives long-term sustainability and exponentially better ROI.

2)    Referring to a logo as a brand.

A logo is nothing more than an icon; a visual representation of a brand.

When you see the logos of Rolex, John Deere, Ritz Carlton, Crest or any other brand for that matter, each makes you think of something based on experiences and perceptions. Likewise, if you are looking for places to stay on your family vacation and see five different hotel brands to choose from on TripAdvisor (Marriot, Four Seasons, Bernie’s Beds, Hilton Hotels and Motel 6, etc.) you most likely are able to rank them in quality from excellent to rat trap. If you dig a bit deeper and ask yourself how you were able to rank those hotels, it’s because of experiences (brand touch points), reviews, word-of-mouth, etc. That’s brand driven marketing!

3)    Confusing or conflating a brand position and market positioning.

A brand position takes into account the emotional benefits a product/service provides to its target audience. Therefore, brand positioning, done well, is sustainable over the long haul.

Market positioning, on the other hand, is always in a state of flux due to the influence of outside factors whether they be political, economic, technological advances, competitive issues and so on.

To understand brand positioning, think about this…before the Mac, there were just computers.

4)    Believing that refreshing your logo refreshes your brand.

A logo refresh is nothing more than a visual facelift. Refreshing a logo without a matching refresh in the culture of your company and the offering of something new that is deemed to be desirable to your target audience does nothing more than confuse them. It makes them wonder what’s going on with your company that you now have a new logo. “What else is new?” they ask. If you don’t have a meaningful answer to this question, then refreshing your logo will be an exercise in futility.

Take Pepsi for example. They’ve been competing with Coca-Cola for market share as far back as we can remember. Coca-Cola’s logo has changed ever so slightly over the years since its inception 1886. Pepsi, on the other hand, has changed their logo nearly a dozen times. Except for small blips in increased market share due to short-lived Coca-Cola brand blunders, they’ve never managed to overtake Coca-Cola. This is perfect evidence of the fact that a logo refresh of and by itself doesn’t do much of anything to refresh or change the perception of your brand, except possibly add in a bit of confusion.

Before a logo refresh, think through the brand promise, then bring it to life through visual assets, experience and communications. Well-planned brand identities create vastly improved bottom line returns.

And then there are those cases where changing a logo can actually upset customers. This is precisely what happened when the Gap made a logo change – customers relentlessly voiced their strong disapproval of the new logo and the Gap had no choice but to apologize and go back to their original design. (I think the Gap was pleasantly surprised that so many people were so passionate about the Gap brand.)

5)    Believing your brand is determined by gathering intelligence from your target audience.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a terribly confusing and ineffective way to create a brand. It relies on the voices of those who have no knowledge of your companies’ intellectual or creative assets – the only assets that a brand can be built upon.

Companies that adopt this approach are essentially telling customers, “We give up. We have no idea what to do anymore because you’re not buying our stuff. Please tell us what you think we should do and we’ll try our best to do it.”

Compare this to confident brands that truly define innovation and have changed the game in their industries: Keurig, Dyson, Apple, Wisp, Nest Labs, Anytime Fitness, Tesla Motors, and Amazon. 

Brand development is a science unto itself that is separate from marketing and public relations. Therefore, it’s always best to work with a firm that not only understands the mortgage industry but also has the proper credentials to provide branding and brand development services.