Branding is Everyone’s Business
Giving back meaning to misused words
Giving back meaning to misused words
In today’s business economy there are three words which have become so interchangeable that each has lost its true meaning, creating confusion in the field and for their audiences. Branding, Advertising, and Marketing are three, although related, different disciplines focusing on very specific components of selling a product or service. Because the meanings have become convoluted, branding has lost its true value in the marketplace and the reason it’s so important to everyone in your organization. Let’s try to clear this up by first telling you how I define these disciplines.
These terms are not interchangeable but they are related
Branding is the message of your organization. It’s what you want to say to the world about your company and your product or service. Branding defines your organization inside and out.
Advertising is the delivery of your message. The campaigns you run, the social media you engage, and the packaging you use all work together to deliver your brand message.
Marketing is the research of your delivery. Whether it’s figuring out who to target before launching a campaign or running the numbers when one is finished, marketing helps you find out if your message got delivered to the right place.
Branding, Advertising, and Marketing work closely together but they are separate disciplines.
Do you see the importance of clearly defining these three seemingly synonymous words? Branding is the only discipline that permeates every department in your organizational chart and preserving the integrity of your message is the responsibility of everyone attached to your brand. Therefore, the more cohesive your brand identity is throughout your organization, the more enthusiastic your employees will be about preserving your message in their daily work lives.
Reading the last paragraph, you may have thought, “Brand identity? That just sounds like adspeak to me. What does that really mean?” If that’s the case, let’s replace the word brand identity with a term most companies understand: company culture. Building and maintaining a company culture requires businesses to clearly identify:
Who they are?
What do they want to be?
How they are going to get there?
This company culture building process is the first step in building your brand identity and defining your message. A company that deeply understands their brand identity will attract customers, employees, and partners who mesh with their message. Whether it’s your sales team who is in front of your customers or your engineers designing a new product, a clearly defined message will help lead the way to customer satisfaction.
Forbes wrote an article about cultural intelligence and brought up some of the usual players when we talk about great brand identities; Target, Apple, McDonald’s, and more recently Facebook. According to the article, “cultural intelligence exists when a company trusts itself enough to live the promise of its culture in how its brands communicate with its audience”. Successful branding, in my opinion, is about creating a message that does just that. It “lives the promise of its culture”.
Branding is more than a logo and a tagline. By defining and understanding its true value, you can build an organization that delivers on its message and builds a loyal group of employees and customers.