Marketing Vs. Branding: 5 Key Differences

While marketing and branding work hand in hand to drive sales and increase profits. They are fundamentally different. Understanding the differences between Marketing vs. branding will help you use each tool to derive maximum benefit for your company.

Digital marketing is the use of digital channels such as social media, mobile applications, emails or websites to advertise goods and services. It helps companies or entrepreneurs to advertise and promote their products, services or brands to online users. E.g. when a brand like Dano uses Google Display ads to promote their new variants to their buyers, That’s digital marketing.

Branding, on the other hand, involves values a company believes in, its mission and how potential customers feel about or perceive the company to be. Simply, the perception and emotional connection a company have with its customers.

The idea of branding bleeds into how companies distinguish themselves through things such as company name, logo, tag line, colour and their choice of fonts (style and size).

These elements come together to set an identification for your brand in the minds of customers and in a crowded marketplace such as Ghana.

Differences between digital marketing and branding

Marketing strategies come and go, branding is forever; strategies used in marketing are temporary. Every tactic used to market a product or service has obvious beginnings, middle and end. Here are more ways in which branding and marketing differ but complement each other;

• Branding involves the perceptions and emotional connection a business has with its customers, marketing involves product and service promotion to potential customers.

• Branding is a vast term that includes all the messages that affect and govern all the processes of a business. That is properly identifying a company’s mission, values and vision. Whereas marketing is the fixed pattern of methods and tools needed to promote a business. That is the presence of products and services for sale, advertisement, relationship management and a business plan.

• Brands are larger than any marketing activity. Brands stick to the conscience of a customer after he or she has been exposed to any digital marketing campaign. It rarely drives on-the-spot purchases, but it contributes heavily to a customer’s purchasing decision.

• Digital marketing discovers and stimulates buyers whereas branding makes devoted customers. Marketing is basically introducing tactics to get products and services moving to consumers and potential customers. Branding can be explained to be the strategies put in place to create a memory of products and services in the minds of customers, develop and establish meaningful relationships and emotional connections with customers.

• Digital marketing influences an immediate response of customers to purchase a product or service whereas branding influences the buying decision of a consumer by leaving an impact in the mind of customers.  

Final Thoughts

Although digital marketing and branding in 2020 have bled heavily into each other, there is still a difference between the two. As much as both are tools to be used in promoting your business, they are different type of arrows in your business quiver. Simply put, branding is more about perception and connection, whereas marketing is more targeted at ensuring that services are patronised and products bought.

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