What Do We Mean By "Brand"?

Brand vs. Branding vs. Brand Marketing: Breaking them down so you know where to invest.

Welcome to the 2nd edition of my newsletter! 🗞️ Last week, I broke down brand-market fit and why it’s the must-have complement to product-market fit. If you missed it, read it here:

Why You Need Brand-Market Fit

This is a space for us to break down the pressing topics facing operators advocating for brand-led growth in product-first, founder-led, performance-obsessed companies. But I also don’t want to rush into the weeds too fast.

It makes sense to start with the fundamentals—frameworks for thinking about brand investment, interplay with product and growth marketing tactics—but also core language we use that needs to be clearly defined and aligned on to avoid distracting from leadership-level investment decisions. This post is an attempt to clarify the language we use.

You’re here because you recently subscribed or signed up for one of my resources—my course waitlist on Maven, lightning lesson, or Notion templates.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

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I’m on a mission to end the phrase “doing brand.”

All the time, I hear founders (and other marketers, for that matter) say “We’re not ‘doing brand’ yet” or “We’re not budgeting for brand spend right now.” Or even “Good products sell themselves, we don’t need brand.”

An example of the “max out growth before ‘going into brand’” story.

If your company is still very early, in the process of finding product-market fit, then, yeah, don’t invest in marketing yet. But brand, branding and brand marketing aren’t the same, and you have a brand whether you think so or not.

Let’s define (brand, branding, and brand marketing):

1. Everything about your business that a prospect or customer sees makes up your branding. You actively control this.

2. How you choose to get that “everything” to the prospect or customer is your brand marketing. You actively control this.

3. Everything a prospect or customer thinks about you is your brand. You do not actively control this.

The moment your company or product exists, you have a brand. At day zero, the company’s brand is the founders’ reputation. When early employees join, their experience becomes part of the brand. When investors come in, their logos become part of the brand. When a product is released, the UX is part of the brand. Any media coverage, any customer service interaction, any error message, any Glassdoor review—all part of your brand. 

You have a brand (e.g. perceptions, associations, a reputation) whether you’re building it with intention or not.

You influence perception and awareness of your brand via branding and brand marketing.

These two efforts primarily make up brand-building:

🪞 Branding: The process of creating and maintaining a unique identity, values, and perception for a company or product in the minds of consumers. Every touchpoint a customer has with your company informs their perception of your brand—words, colors, and pictures—but also your product UX/I and customer support scripts and checkout flow.

🪧 Brand Marketing: The strategic activities undertaken to promote and reinforce a brand’s identity, increase awareness among consumers, and drive consumer engagement (ideally purchase and retention behavior). Brand marketing is a revenue- and sales-driver, typically measured by leading metrics (e.g. awareness, traffic, or inbound demo requests) and brand health tracking.

Since your brand exists all the time, doesn’t it make sense to look at every opportunity to shape it with intention?

When to invest in branding

The answer is… always! Because it’s virtually free to invest in branding.

Yes, it costs money to hire designers or copywriters who give substance and consistency to your visual and style identity, and it costs money to hire a brand strategist who can dedicate time to thinking about this as comprehensively as possible.

But think about your audience touchpoints: your homepage, pricing page, sales and customer support scripts, hold music, emails and email footers, error messages, your mission statement and boilerplate and press kit, careers page and job descriptions, social media (and founder profiles), review sites—the list goes on. All of these are opportunities to present a cohesive and consistent set of values and identity; places where being generic (or all over the place) will do nothing to earn audience trust and purchase consideration.

Branding is often associated with logos and guidelines—visuals, tone, and style—but really it’s a holistic concept that encompasses a company’s public facing elements.

Admittedly, getting alignment on the core strategy and messages behind all these things is often more challenging than “doing the work…” but that’s for a future post! Subscribe to get future posts and deep dives on this.

Bottom line: Look for any and all opportunities to invest in branding regardless of your ability or intention to invest in brand marketing.

When to invest in brand marketing

Let’s start with my (mildly) spicy 🌶️ take:

All brand marketing is product marketing.
Not all product marketing is brand marketing.

All brand marketing is growth marketing.
Not all growth marketing is brand marketing.

Why? Because brand marketing’s function is to ensure that the messages and images that get shipped (across any channel) address prospects’ perceptions and needs to make a clear connection to what the company offers to address those needs (the product). Brand marketers are experts at making sure the product stands out in the competitive landscape, with growth as the end goal.

Growth marketing, in search of quick wins (i.e. hitting a quarterly goal), sometimes ends up sacrificing user experience (which can erode brand trust). So, not all growth marketing is brand marketing.

Some particularly aggro growth marketing emails (almost one per day for a month since I tried to claim a free ride). I’m sorry, CycleBar!

…plus 4 texts (until I opted out) and 2 voicemails.

Product marketing, focused on conveying functionality, features, and benefits of individual products, sometimes ends up losing sight of the overall brand story or the emotional connection that’s at the core of brand-market fit. So, not all product marketing is brand marketing.

Product marketing pretending to be brand marketing!

He looks like he’s waiting on hold with Comcast.

Well, it says something about their brand. (source)

So am I arguing that all marketing should be brand marketing?

No, but all marketing should consider how it reflects and contributes to the company’s brand. Otherwise, you’re shipping your org chart—and doing your future business (which will probably be more reliant on brand awareness) a disservice.

Duolingo’s absolutely haggard app icon is a great example of growth marketing tactics (driving app engagement) supporting brand values. I love it.

I like to think of brand marketing as branding gone outbound, involving outward-facing campaigns that drive conversation and action so that the audience better recognizes the product and understands its identity.

If marketing (brand, product, or growth marketing) is the active process of getting prospects and customers to understand your value and why it’s relevant to them, then of course branding plays a major role in that—it’s what your product and your marketing looks like and sounds like. Branding makes up all the spoken and unspoken signals about who you serve, how you operate, and how you’re different from everything else out there. All together, that’s the brand.

And branding isn’t something you only do with a six-figure agency (and it doesn’t even have to be expensive!). Since it’s an always-on part of your brand, it shouldn’t be something you delay investment in.

If you aren’t investing in branding, you’re ignoring opportunities to differentiate and create consistency. Consistency is the foundation to building trust, and trust enables conversion (and loyalty). Don’t leave all that on the table.🪑

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My 4-week course on Maven, Brand for Growth-Stage Leaders, dives deep into how marketers can advocate for both branding and brand marketing. The 5th cohort, starting September 2, just opened! You can use the code SUBSTACK to take $200 off your enrollment (until July 31), or join the waitlist for updates.

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Have thoughts on branding vs. brand marketing? What did I miss?

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