Branding vs. Marketing

I got asked several times what is the difference between Branding and Marketing. Both are certainly connected but they certainly aren’t the same. Branding isn’t only the visual representation of a Brand either, as it is popularly believed... In a nutshell: Branding is who you are while Marketing is how you sell yourself, how you attract attention and spread awareness. We may even define Branding as the process of making clients fall in love with our Brand, and Marketing the process of driving sales.

Branding is about defining who you are. The explicit and implicit expression of everything that the brand represents at every touchpoint that a customer has with it (physical and digital).

Marketing primary goal is to generate awareness, interest and desire in your product/service in order to, ultimately, drive sales.

Because Marketing is a touchpoint between the Brand and the Customer, we may say that all Marketing is a form of Branding, but not all Branding is Marketing. Why? Well, not all expressions of a Brand are meant to promote a product/service that leads directly to a sale. Most of them are in fact intended to nurture the relationship between brand and customer and don’t have any call-to-action or second intention to it. Branding wants a relationship and Marketing wants a transaction.

It may seem a little confusing, so let’s compare Apple Branding versus Samsung Marketing.

Apple vs. Samsung

(Focus on the PED - Personal Electronic Devices)

Apple focuses on Branding. Samsung Marketing. Apple is the first company to be worth 3 trillion US dollars and still experts suggest they don’t have the best cellphones, neither the best laptops or tablets, and everyone that owns an Apple product has something to complain about (if not the battery life and updates, the cables and adaptors). Still, they love the brand, promote it and defend it with passion, and keep buying the new iPhones, the new iPads and every single product that Apple releases to the market. Even spending $249 for airpods when Samsung, for example, offers them for free when buying the new release. Why?

Back in 1997, Steve Jobs established the Apple’s Brand Purpose and Positioning that the company [supposedly] still focuses on: Think differently and make humanity go forward. He established Three Core Tenets: Simplicity, Creativity, and Humanity.

So, if we look at everything that Apple does, everything is simple, from the Hardware to the Software, from the Product and Package Design to the Retail Design; everything is about Creativity from their Apps to Apple Tv and their Retail Experiences and Experience Marketing; and everything is about Humanity – the notion that everyone should have a computer at home and it should be user-friendly. Every single touchpoint and interaction that a consumer has with the Brand is thought and worked on to transmit these core values and to create a relationship with the customer.

Let’s think about a customer experience in an Apple store. Not only the retail space is carefully curated with minimal, practical and clean elements, it is stripped to the core of simplicity, and everything that is considered non-essential is removed (experience also transmitted to the packaging, product and software design). The experience in store focuses on the experience between customer and Apple products. Everything is about creativity and the Brand even focuses on creating Experience Marketing momentous where it teaches its customer how to develop their creativity skills using Apple products, either being photography, music, filmmaking, etc. on iPhone, iPad or Mac, without the pressure of finalizing a sale. Even its employees are called Genius. They are helpful, informative and enthusiastic, and, in a way, calling them Genius reinforce Apple’s premise of being this bank of knowledge that it is willing to share with us - normal people.

Apple has been telling you this story over and over again that it is the brand for hip, cool, fun, creative people; so, if you want to make an impact into the world, if you want to be a part of the cool kids, if you work in the creative arts or if you are a creative person you have to own Apple products.

Micheal Platt, Professor of Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania, elaborated a neuroscientist study with Apple vs Samsung phone users and their emotional relationship with the brands. The study discovered that Apple customers revealed a brain that shows the same level of empathy response towards Apple as through their own family, while Samsung users didn’t have any positive or negative responses when good or bad news were revealed about Samsung. The only evidence that Samsung users showed was reverse empathy for Apple news, meaning if the Apple headline was negative, their brain reflected a positive response. Samsung customers seem to be buying Samsung because they dislike Apple and refuse to buy its products. Now, that isn’t very good news for Samsung.

Samsung bases its strategy and marketing efforts on innovative and cutting-edge technology, but when asked about innovative personal digital devices, Samsung isn’t the first option that comes to consumers’ minds (although Samsung has made some breakthrough innovation on the foldables touch phones). Why? Well, that role was already taken by Apple and, although Samsung seems to be pushing for more innovative and revolutionary solutions than its competitors, Apple has been working repeatedly on its branding effort to be perceived as the one that Thinks Differently, and the one that pushes the limits.

Every touchpoint that Samsung has with its customer has the intention of a transaction, of increasing the brand awareness and generating a sale. Not to create and nurture a relationship. It doesn’t develop any kind of loyalty from the customer side. Samsung must emphasize its emotional and intangible brand elements to build strong connections with its customers, and needs a holistic, well-structured and integrated brand purpose and positioning. Afterall, why does Samsung exit? What differentiates it from its competitors? And why should anyone care?

As Simon Sinek explains in his book Start With Why, Apple starts with Why – Why they exist, and the way they communicate is the following: Everything we do we believe in challenge the status quo, we think differently. We do this by offering elegant design, simple to use and user-friendly products. We just happen to make great cellphones. Do you want to buy one? - We are instantly intrigued.

When compared with Samsung communication, we observe that Samsung starts with What – What they do. A Samsung marketing campaign sounds something like: We make great cellphones. They are beautiful design, simple to use and user-friendly. Do you want to buy one? - It doesn’t stimulate any kind of emotion.

The greatest brands are the ones that have a well-established Why and a strong personality, but Samsung seems to have ignored this crucial aspect in building its brand. Although Samsung has been doing all the right things in its communications and its marketing efforts (promoting sport events, digital marketing strategy, print ads and experience marketing, etc.), it has not focused on creating a strong, differentiate personality and identity for its brand, and an emotional connection with its consumers. It doesn’t transmit anything specific in the consumers’ minds, like a Harley-Davidson standing for the independence of western America, or a BMW standing for the ultimate driving experience, or Volvo standing for the safety of your family. As has been mentioned, a successful brand not only offers its customers functional benefits, but also emotional and self-expressive benefits. So, me, as a Samsung cellphone user, who am I?

When you are choosing between brands, you are creating an identity. When you drive that car someone will create an impression of you according to what they know about that brand. You are choosing to express yourself through brands. For example, if you buy a t-shirt from a brand like Nike, you are choosing to be associated with a sports brand, a brand that is all about performance. If you buy an iPhone you are telling the world that you are a cool and creative person. But what about Samsung customers?

We relate to brands in the same way we relate to people. Most people don’t realize that they are subconsciously choosing brands because those brands have some kind of self-expressive value. There is a lot of power in terms of shaping consumers’ decisions and once a brand realizes that and focuses on developing a strong Brand Purpose, Positioning and Strategy, it will become stronger and eventually deliver better economic results.

Ultimately these are the differences between Branding and Marketing: by focusing on Branding a company is not only choosing to build a more reliable Brand but also boosting clients’ relationship and the Word of Mouth; by selecting only Marketing a Brand exposes itself to the market fragilities, it may increase sales momentarily but it runs the risk of not conquering customers’ loyalty. In the end, if you could choose, would you rather that your brand was an Apple or a Samsung?

Ps: It was pointed out by some colleagues that in this article I seem to show preference for Apple. I believe it is necessary to admit that, despite admiring Samsung innovative products, Samsung is far from reaching Apples’ brand status for the reasons already mentioned and more (even though it is my belief that Tim Cock is slowly destroying Apples’ brand, but that is a subject for a different article).