Marketing and branding walk hand-in-hand

Somewhere in the sillier parts of LinkedIn, there are troublesome memes that say that branding and marketing are separable. Here’s a quick rebuttal.

There are three major schemas for strategic brand management, one developed by Jean-Noel Kapferer, another by David Aaker and a third by Kevin Lane Keller. All three have at their centers the product. Without the discipline of marketing, the product remains in the warehouse. Even in prototyping, branding supports results, the same goal as marketing.

Branding and marketing walk hand in hand. If a brand manager attempts to separate the two, you can justifiably question the validity of the brand management schema or the brand manager’s commitment to the bottom-line.

Let’s look at the correspondence between marketing and brand management using basic 4P marketing. Product determines utility, be it reasoned attributes or emotional benefits. If the product doesn’t support utility, the brand will be weak. Price determines perceived value assigned to the utility, be it economy or premium. Place is the distribution footprint. If the product reaches the wrong consumer at the wrong time, the brand will have a poor image, tending towards irrelevant. Promotion is the establishment of identity and the difference between push and pull marketing.

The 7P marketing mix takes it three steps further with people, process and physical evidence, all of which have strong correspondence to branding. People and human-centric interactions are a key part of identity and image formation. Processes are at the internal heart of delivering customer value. Physical evidence is the set of facilities that demonstrate the existence of a brand in an environment. That could be offices and plant, dedicated outlets, or a website. It might even be branded in-store freezers.

An 8th P is emerging now, partners. Which partner brands best carry the identity forward while fulfilling the bottom line. Think about Coke and the identity it obtains from presence in sit-down fast-food outlets to begin to unravel the consideration. Who is the ideal partner for a brand? It might also be a retail chain.

The current trend in roles is that marketing is more concerned with promotion: setting up advertising and communication campaigns. However, this gives short shrift to the very valuable marketing facets of product, price and place. The role of the marketing manager as promoter-in-chief is generally more feasible in a corporate service environment where marketing can exert little influence over the nature of project-based services and pricing.

On the other hand, a good brand manager will also understand that her or his role is to influence identity with a bottom-line view that considers product development, pricing and distribution. The brand manager’s role must also be respected and empowered to act effectively. In some instances, particularly in FMCG, a brand manager will take responsibility for the entire value chain, including all elements of the marketing mix.

The lines between brand management and marketing management are blurred. The point of this riff is to show that because marketing and branding are highly interlinked, by extension, branding must often fulfil the role of marketing and vice versa. At the very least, branding has to augment marketing

The concept that branding can be divorced from the marketing role is simplistic and counterproductive. Branding must contribute to activities that contribute to the bottom-line and be accountable in terms of defined metrics. The only confusion can be that the activities are more clearly stated in the role of marketing and have not yet been directly linked to the field of branding.

If not held accountable, branding becomes performance art and is ultimately disposable. And even performance art has its own brands, be they movie franchises or varieties of protest such as ‘Just Stop Oil’.