Branding vs. Marketing vs. Advertising — The Differences Explained
You hear the terms branding, marketing, and advertising thrown around so often, and sometimes even interchangeably. While it is true they all are interconnected and feed into one another, each of these are a different tool with their own role in your brand’s communications, and also require their own skillset. Having an understanding of their differences will help you know how to better harness each one, but also can help you as an owner know how to hire for each one.
That last part is something I’ve seen owners, unfortunately, miss the mark on a lot over the years. Someone gets hired for a marketing position, but then gets tasked with handling branding and design duties. Or on the flipside, maybe a designer gets asked to handle something like digital marketing strategy.
As a small business or home service company, part of this is admittedly just being scrappy and having your team wear multiple hats while you grow. But sometimes there is an element of an owner thinking they are hiring the right person or contracting the right company for a role, only for them really not to have the sort of skillset they believe they are hiring for.
Branding - The Battery
Branding is the collection of visuals and language that helps to shape how your company is perceived. This is going to be your name, logo, brand colors, font styles, photography styles, your brand voice, etc. All of these things come together to act as a battery, or the fuel, for your marketing and advertising.
Just like with a battery, if your branding doesn’t have a strong “charge,” then all of the marketing or advertising you integrate it into will not be able to work optimally.
Whether it’s your digital marketing, your vehicle wraps, your print collateral, or anything else in between, if you aren’t getting the returns you’ve been hoping for, it is often because you’ve been using a battery with a weak charge. And typically what happens is that, if you haven’t invested into getting your branding right, you are forced to spend more on marketing and advertising to get the same result that having a strong brand would do on its own.
As a small business or home service company, usually you will need to hire an outside company to handle these duties for you, but you need to be careful of who you choose. Like the medical field, graphic design is a very broad and specialized field. You want to look for companies that use language like branding, brand design, brand identity design, or visual identity design.
Marketing - the Strategy
Once you have a strong brand developed, you then need to figure out what your gameplan for customer acquisition is and how you want to inform this audience about your company. In simple terms, marketing is strategy.
Conversations with your head of marketing could sound something like “Most of our online leads are paid leads. We need to build more organic leads, so let’s take steps to build more brand awareness in our local community.”
As far as branding is concerned, it of course fuels your marketing efforts, but branding itself could even be a marketing strategy. Maybe you and all of your competitors share similar brand colors and naming conventions. Your marketing person or team could suggest rebranding as a part of a larger strategy.
When hiring someone with expertise in marketing, the people you are going to want are usually a bit different than who you would look to for branding. Even if they know more than your average joe, usually these hires won’t have big backgrounds in graphic design or branding. I’m painting with broad brushstrokes here, but often their college background will be in something closer to business or marketing, not the arts or design.
Advertising - The Medium
Now that you have your branding buttoned up and you have a goal for your marketing, it’s time to act on what you’ve put into place. Advertising is more or less choosing the correct messaging medium(s) to carry out your marketing gameplan.
As an example, let’s revisit the hypothetical marketing strategy I mentioned above. Let’s say you’re a home service company and your goal is to build more organic leads by becoming more visible in your local community. What are some of the best ways to do that? That could be by wrapping your company vehicles, doing a billboard campaign, getting a booth at local trade shows, etc.
Putting It All Into Practice
When you have branding, marketing, and advertising all firing off on all cylinders and working together, that’s where the magic happens. That’s where the growth is. To highlight what this looks like in practice, let’s take you through a rebranding project we did for Beach Mulch.
The Goal
Beach Mulch came to us with a few problems to tackle. One of the big ones they wanted us to help solve was the trouble they were having breaking into the residential market. When they took a look at their brand, they realized it was part of the problem. It was very industrial, intimidating, and didn’t feel welcoming for homeowners. That was what led them to us at Wraps Ink.
You could say their marketing strategy was to break into the residential market with the help of a rebranding effort.
The main advertising medium they chose to carry this out was with their vehicle wraps. Beach Mulch uses these massive blower trucks, which are part of what has contributed to the brand’s previous industrial and intimidating feel. Integrating their new, more inviting branding across their vehicles was key to changing this perception that homeowners previously had.
Ever since their rebranding effort, even without the new brand fully integrated into across all of their digital channels, they immediately began to see results. Their booths are now the envy of their competitors at trade shows, plenty of positive public response, and more importantly they’ve finally gained substantial traction in that residential market they had been struggling to break into.
We’ve Got you Covered
If you want a company who knows how to properly align your branding, marketing, and advertising, we are here to help. You can give either of our offices a call, or send us an email to start a conversation about your project.
Murrells Inlet Office: 843.651.6003
Charleston Office: 843.823.9274
Email: sales@wrapsink.com
