Every company needs it. Every company should do it. But where do you start and what are the differences between branding, marketing and advertising?
Branding is your companies strategic promise.
Branding allows you to develop a strategic promise to connect with the hearts and minds of your customers and employees. Developing your company vision, mission, goals and voice is critically important to generating the brand idea and ultimately the beginning of your storytelling. When developed correctly, your brand becomes recognizable by more and more people in your marketing efforts. It is important to remember that ultimately your brand becomes a person’s gut feeling about your product, service or organization. Brands become emotional because they are defined by individuals not your company. In other words, it’s not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is. That is why developing your brand promise is so critical.
Marketing is strategy. What are the goals we want to achieve?
Once your branding is in place and your brand promise has been developed. Selecting the right media will determine your reach and audience for achieving your goals. For example, a channel could be social media, banner ads, websites, tv, radio, print publications or public relations. It is important to align your brand strategy with you marketing channels to help achieve your goals. If your strategy is to sell high end fashion, choosing channels that cater to lower end customers will not help you achieve your sales goal. However, if one of your strategies is to increase sales among pet owners, promoting your product on social media would probably be a good tactic.
Advertising is execution. What is the best medium to tell the story?
Once your media is in place and your goals have been set, selecting the right advertising medium is crucial to communicating with your audience. Advertising mediums have a variety of design solutions and many refer to this as strategic design. For example, creating advertising solely based around typography (no images) may be a preferred medium when connecting with your audience or it could be using images only and no text. Advertising mediums have a variety of solutions that provide visual engagement and will help with brand awareness. Selecting the right medium will help tell your story effectively.
