Question
What are the differences between marketing and branding?
Answer
Drucker noted that the job of marketing is to make sales superfluous. I think that's still one of the best definitions of marketing around.
Within that function, the job of the brand is to serve as the permanent magnet which creates inbound attraction without requiring force.
Unlike with cattle, branding in modern marketing is not really an activity you undertake to "mark" your products. It's a hoped-for outcome. It doesn't become a brand simply because you slap a name on it.
You take on activities like choosing a name and a positioning message, and running a PR (not advertising) campaign to try and get that positioning across. If the message sticks and the name/logo get associated strongly with the message the way you'd hoped, you'll start seeing accelerating inbound interest that makes selling less and less important. Once you get past a tipping point where you're getting an unfair attention-share in the segment (you spend only 30% of the money, but you get 80% of the attention, say), you've created a real brand.
If that process gets so good you don't have to pay your sales people via ridiculous commission structures, or you are able to fire them entirely, you've created a great brand.
A truly great brand is one that can get you the preferred vendor status, commanding a higher margin, even in categories that have matured and commoditized completely, with zero differentiation. Asprin and Advil are examples. Some people still pay extra for the brand (I don't...).
Of course there's a lot more to marketing than the activities that are explicitly about creating a brand, but maintaining and increasing "brand equity" is the soul of the function. Everything else supports that. Why? Because strong brand equity quite literally means more revenue in the bank at lower cost.
Within that function, the job of the brand is to serve as the permanent magnet which creates inbound attraction without requiring force.
Unlike with cattle, branding in modern marketing is not really an activity you undertake to "mark" your products. It's a hoped-for outcome. It doesn't become a brand simply because you slap a name on it.
You take on activities like choosing a name and a positioning message, and running a PR (not advertising) campaign to try and get that positioning across. If the message sticks and the name/logo get associated strongly with the message the way you'd hoped, you'll start seeing accelerating inbound interest that makes selling less and less important. Once you get past a tipping point where you're getting an unfair attention-share in the segment (you spend only 30% of the money, but you get 80% of the attention, say), you've created a real brand.
If that process gets so good you don't have to pay your sales people via ridiculous commission structures, or you are able to fire them entirely, you've created a great brand.
A truly great brand is one that can get you the preferred vendor status, commanding a higher margin, even in categories that have matured and commoditized completely, with zero differentiation. Asprin and Advil are examples. Some people still pay extra for the brand (I don't...).
Of course there's a lot more to marketing than the activities that are explicitly about creating a brand, but maintaining and increasing "brand equity" is the soul of the function. Everything else supports that. Why? Because strong brand equity quite literally means more revenue in the bank at lower cost.