Marketing Vs. Branding Vs. Story-Telling
Marketing has traditionally been distribution of content you want to have in front of your customers. In the case of our particular industry, marketing has traditionally been revolving around the quality of the products, the speed of the service, the time you are selling back to your customers (i.e. no appointment necessary) and the quality of the customer service.
Branding is a formal business word for reputation. Branding is the distribution of content to create an image of what your business is in relation to its customer. Branding traditionally was controlled end-to-end by the business, and the business carried the narrative however they wished. With the scale of the Internet, it is possible that the mass-flow of viral marketing can hijack a brand and create its own narrative. We have seen positive and negative examples of this countless times with larger brands.
Story telling is how your business relates to the customer and what separates your business from an identical replica. We are seeing large businesses fail to embrace story-telling, and one by one over the next 10 years, some of the largest brands we know will be extinct due to a lack of story-telling on platforms that have influence.
All three of these key components to customer acquisition have nuances that need to be catered to, depending on the platform they are being performed on. Any one of these three actions can be done on 2018 forms of distribution, but the nuances of the platform will determine performance.