Branding Vs. Marketing: Learn The Key Differences

It’s easy to confuse branding for marketing or mix the terms. The lines between these two are blurred because establishing your brand and promoting your business is marketing. 

With little thought, anybody in marketing can say branding is what a company is and what it stands for. Marketing is how a company shows/sells itself. 

OR branding is a company’s distinct identity; marketing is the tactical process of promoting its product or services BY educating the target consumer on how the product/service meets their needs. 

But is this an accurate explanation that distinguishes branding and marketing? 

Maybe. 

What is branding?

Branding is “a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them,” says Philip Kotler, Professor Emeritus of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management. These visual elements are “intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors.” 

Anyone visiting “a supermarket will see thousands of brand identities. And within any category, such as beers, one will see many identities. But they won’t mean much to customers who are uninformed”, adds Kotler. 

Branding is a company’s unique identity that distinguishes it from its competitors. It’s why customers choose one brand over another. 

Kevin Keller, Professor of Marketing at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, takes it one step further. He explains that branding is “the process of creating mental structures and making them come alive.” To conceptualize what “mental structure” means, Keller distinguishes between brand identity and brand image. 

Brand identity is how a brand portrays itself to the world and distinguishes itself from competitors, while the brand image is how customers perceive it. 

The Contextual Model of Branding 

In his book Marketing Management, Philip Kotler designed 6 branding models to explain how companies can create a unique identity that resonates with customers. 

Brand Purpose

Brand purpose refers to a company’s reason for being beyond profit-making. It reflects the founders’ experiences and vision for addressing a gap they saw in the market. 

MailChimp, the email marketing platform, started as an in-house email marketing solution for the founders’ web design agency. At the time, their clients asked for help with email marketing, and they built the tool to meet this need. MailChimp was a side project for the first five years, but its purpose, “to help small businesses better communicate with their customers via email,” never changed. 

Brand purpose answers the question: what is the brand promising to accomplish for the buyer? In other words, what is your core mission beyond the product or service you offer? Next is…

Brand Positioning

This describes how a brand is perceived by consumers when placed side-by-side with competitors. Kotler says it is “the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market.” 

Building a brand involves defining where your brand stands in the market, but it is more about how customers perceive it. The focus here is on how the brand is perceived, not necessarily how it is. 

To Kotler, the target audience of this branding stage is the “target market,” not all consumers. A brand cannot be all things to all people. Some consumers will prefer a Tesla, while some will choose a Volkswagen or General Motors. 

Appealing to a mass market often results in a weak, generic positioning. 

Apple has positioned itself as the king of consumer tech because of its user-friendly interface, strong security features, and integration with other Apple products. However, other brands offer these integrations. Android products like Google Pixel, Samsung, and Nothing phones produce competitive devices, but 60.77% of the market still uses an iPhone because of the perceived prestige of Apple products. That’s Apple’s positioning at work.  

Brand Differentiation

Brand differentiation is how you make your brand unique to attract and retain customers. There are five layers to this. 

• The first is the core benefit, the fundamental problem your product solves and the customer needs it satisfies. Every automobile company has cars that can go from A to B. That’s their core benefit. 
• The second layer is the primary product, a suite of essential features that meet customer expectations regarding quality, performance, and usability. Every car can go from A to B, but not every car is a Mercedes. 
• The third layer is the expected product. These are features and use cases that match customer expectations and provide the performance and service they anticipate. Every car can go from A to B, and Lexus offers significant performance, but a Lexus isn’t a Porsche 911 or a McLaren 720S. 
• The next layer of brand differentiation is the augmented product. This is true innovation. It is where differentiation happens. It’s the set of features that surpass customer expectations and surprise them with something unique and beneficial they didn’t expect. For example, the Rivian R1T all-electric pickup truck— it’s a combination of performance, utility, luxury, and sustainability. For luxury car fans, this level could be a Lamborghini or other supercars with exciting & innovative features. 
• The fifth layer of differentiation is the potential product. This level explores the future potential of the product and brand. It’s about anticipating evolving customer needs and desires and developing new features, services, and experiences to meet them. 

Again, every automobile company produces cars that go from A to B. But not every car is a Lexus, Porsche 911, McLaren 720S, or a Rivian R1T. 

By focusing on brand differentiation, Kotler emphasizes how meeting basic needs but delighting consumers with super features helps the company stay competitive. 

Brand Identity 

This refers to its visual identity, tone of voice, consistency, and authenticity. 

• Visual identity (logo, color scheme, and imagery)
• Tone of voice (as used on blogs, social media, live shows, and other company publications)
• Consistency. A company builds its brand image by maintaining consistent product quality, customer experience, tone of voice, and visual branding elements. 
• Authenticity. The brand must be true to its core purpose and values—this authentic identity helps customers resonate with you. This is why over 13 million people use MailChimp, which accounts for 63.36% of the market share. 

Brand identity is the visual, verbal, and emotional aspects that make your brand recognizable, and it’s as important as your product. 

Brand Trust

This is about establishing trust so customers can have confidence in the company’s claims and offerings. If Elon Musk said he had a spaceship that could fly crewed missions to the International Space Station, almost everyone would believe him because his company had earned our trust. He has already flown NASA engineers to the International Space Station. 

Kotler believes brand trust is part of a “storehouse of trust” that becomes increasingly important as consumer choices multiply in a marketplace with numerous options. 

As with every other part of a business, brand trust is built by consistently delivering quality products or services that meet (or exceed) customer expectations. 

It’s about making promises and consistently fulfilling them, especially in a world where word-of-mouth marketing is directly responsible for 90% of global purchases and has a 37% chance of bringing returning customers. A world where 78% of social media users talk about the brands they follow and where a trusted review makes 92% of B2B buyers more likely to pay a premium for a product. 

Brand Beneficence 

Last is Kotler’s contextual model of branding. It focuses on framing the brand’s offerings to minimize a company’s negative individual and societal effects while maximizing their positive impacts. 

This goes beyond satisfying customer needs or building trust — it’s about how the company actively contributes to the well-being of individuals and society. 

To Kotler, a brand that achieves beneficence serves its customers and society well. This concept aligns with the growing consumer expectation of corporate social responsibility— brands should play a positive role in addressing social and environmental issues. For brands to demonstrate goodwill, they can 

• Invest in sustainable practices
• Support social causes, or
• Invest in community development initiatives. 

However, while Kotler focuses on differentiation and how companies can differentiate themselves, Keller advocates for branding that creates emotional connections with consumers by consistently delivering something customers want, desire, or need. 

He defends this by saying companies should pursue brand equity. While building a brand based on Kotler’s model is important, companies should also build brand equity. To show the brand, companies need marketing, which is different from branding. 

Let’s talk about brand equity. 

How to Build Brand Equity, According to Kevin Keller 

Building brand equity creates a strong, favorable, and unique brand image in consumers’ minds. It is the added value a product gains from your company (brand name) because of several things your company does right. 

Adequate brand equity means more customers will prefer your products, recommend them to others, and remain loyal even when faced with competitive alternatives. This is why over 33% of Americans choose Hershey’s over other chocolate brands like Nestlé or Ferrero. 

Keller’s Brand Equity or Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) Model is based on creating positive associations, feelings, and perceptions about a product or service. It is structured as a pyramid with four stages: 

Brand Identity: Who Are You? 

This stage focuses on brand awareness and recognition. It involves ensuring consumers can identify your brand and associate it with a specific product, service, or need. 

The key questions to ask consumers include: 

• How do they classify your product? 
• Can they differentiate your unique selling proposition from competitors’? 
• Does your brand stand out during key buying stages? 

When people think about buying an electric vehicle (EV), they consider a Tesla before other market alternatives. This is because Tesla, aside from being one of the pioneers of the EV “movement,” has consistently delivered quality and reliable vehicles. 

Brand Meaning: What Are You? 

Once familiar with a brand, consumers need to understand what it stands for. Keller divides this stage into: 

• Brand Performance: Does the product meet expectations? Long-term reliability contributes to brand equity. This is why people choose Toyota and Honda as reliable car brands. 
• Brand Imagery: How do consumers perceive the brand’s image and personality? A healthy brand image contributes to the value attached to the brand. It’s why Apple’s “think different” vision statement resonates with people who believe in innovative technologies. 

Brand Response: What Do I Think and Feel About You? 

This stage assesses if the brand experience lives up to its promises. It is divided into judgments and feelings. 

• Judgments: These are negative sentiments that detract from the brand experience. They may include poor product quality and a lack of credibility. Although Tesla wants to create the safest cars in the world, it recalled nearly 2 million vehicles on U.S. roads to limit the use of its Autopilot feature after 1,000 accidents related to the use of autopilot in vehicles. But did consumers talk badly about Tesla? —
• Feelings: Do consumers feel positive emotions when you fulfill brand promises? This could be in exceptional customer service and superior product features. Many Tesla fans were twice as excited as Elon when Tesla released the Cybertruck. 

Brand response aims to ensure that the positive feelings are more than the judgments. 

Brand Resonance: What Is Our Connection Like? 

This peak explains the bond between the brand and its consumers. At this stage, customers are ardent advocates who remain loyal, defend the brand against criticism, and actively promote it to others—like the average Apple user. 

For context, Americans love pizza. While Domino’s Pizza invests heavily in increasing its customer base, some people recommend it to others because they’d probably feel guilty if they didn’t. This is why Domino’s Pizza has 42% of the market share as of 2021. 

While branding is a significant part of a company’s existence, companies cannot fully express what they are or gain the affection of their target market without marketing. 

What is Marketing? 

To Kotler, “marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit.” It is about identifying “unfulfilled needs and desires” to pinpoint which “segments the company is capable of serving best” to design and promote a product that addresses a pain point. 

Keller slightly disagrees. He believes marketing is not about the money customers pay and the functional benefits they get. It is about the broader value they perceive regarding what they have to give (time, energy, thought) versus what they get (not just product performance but also peace of mind, emotions, etc.).

By “broader value they perceive,” Keller leans into buyer emotions. 

People only buy when they feel they are paying the right price for a product (or service), and they can only feel convinced if the product has significant value. 

The work of showing the brand and the product’s value lies on marketers. There are many institutions and processes that can communicate this. They are divided into two entities: inbound and outbound marketing: 

What is Inbound Marketing? 

Inbound marketing is the strategy of attracting hyper-targeted consumers through owned media channels. These channels include the company website, blog, podcast, events or webinars, and sometimes social media platforms. 

The inbound channels involve the “pull” technique; the company attracts hyper-targeted leads through organic marketing. 

The typical process of attracting leads through organic traffic is the non-linear buyer’s journey (especially in B2B). For this article, let’s call it attracting strangers till they become advocates of the brand: 

Source 

• Attract strangers surfing a Google results page through optimized content with a captivating title that mentions the problem and the solution your blog offers. This is where your target audience can discover your blog posts (or other high-value resources) that address their pain point. They’ll click on your web page if they like your headline. 

We are an SEO agency that ensures every piece of content achieves specific business goals. We can help you with your SEO content strategy needs, from ideation to writing and reporting on content performance. Check out our service page for more about this. 

• Step two is where strangers become visitors. Here, they consume content that addresses their pain points and positions your product or service as THE best solution. 
• Visitors become leads who share their email addresses to learn more about your business. You have built a solid lead generation strategy at this stage through other high-value resources. You offer these resources in exchange for their email address (or for complex lead generation forms), details about their business, how you can help them, and their most pressing concern about a product that solves XYZ (aka, your product/service). 
• Leads become customers after they read your email and are educated about your product. At this stage, they are provided with more resources to help them see how your product works. Or the advantages of your services. 

For B2B products, your leads have probably booked a demo, signed up for a free trial, or are using a limited version of your product. As Keller argues, they become customers when they’re willing to pay for product performance and the peace of mind it offers. 

• Customers become advocates and are delighted to talk about your product to others in the industry. To make this happen, you must have provided a great onboarding experience to help them maximize your product. If you’re a service-based company, you must have been exceptionally kind and attentive throughout your meetings (and during the work) to make them almost feel bad for not referring you when they have the opportunity. 

Word-of-mouth marketing is essential, and the impression of the post-buying stage is crucial in deciding whether customers become advocates. 

What is Outbound Marketing? 

Outbound marketing, or traditional marketing, involves marketing to potential customers to generate interest in your product or service. Unlike inbound marketing, which attracts customers through organic content, outbound marketing “pushes” messages to a broad audience through advertising, direct mail, and other channels. Key channels include: 

• Advertising via TV commercials, radio ads, print advertisements (newspapers, magazines), and online banner ads.  
• Direct Mail by sending unsolicited promotional materials such as brochures, catalogs, and postcards to potential customers’ mailboxes. 
• Cold Calling — the practice of reaching out to potential customers to introduce a product or service and generate sales leads. 
• Email Blasts — sending unsolicited mass promotional emails to an extensive list of recipients, often without prior engagement or consent. 
• Trade Shows and Events — participating in or hosting events to showcase products and services directly to potential customers. 
• Outdoor Advertising — using billboards, posters, and signage in public places to attract attention. 

However, aside from a few practices such as advertising and trade shows & events, some outbound marketing strategies are outdated. 

These strategies create brand awareness and generate leads, but they are more expensive and may have lower ROI than more targeted, inbound strategies. Modern advertising practices through PPC (pay-per-click) and retargeting campaigns are better because they help marketers target specific audiences for their products/services. Read more about PPC ads here. 

In our experience, you can integrate SEO (inbound) and PPC (outbound) strategies for better results. We wrote about that here and about the ROI comparison between SEO and PPC for amplifying your marketing efforts. 

To Conclude

Branding focuses on a company’s perception and connection to its target audience. Marketing conveys the messaging that ensures the target market knows about the company, its product/service, and how it is different from competitors.