What is Branding in Marketing?
Updated: Sep 20
Brand marketing is the process of establishing and growing a relationship between a brand and consumers.
Rather than highlighting an individual product or service, brand marketing promotes the entirety of the brand, using the products and services as proof points that support the brand's promise.
The channels available for a brand marketing strategy are the same channels that companies can use for product marketing activities, such as digital, social, and paid search advertising. A good strategy is to use different channels together to create a media mix that reaches a wide audience. For example, brand marketers might use a brand advertising strategy supplemented by email and content marketing efforts to drive brand awareness and reach potential customers across multiple digital spaces. But when it comes to deciding the right messages for the right audiences in these spaces, we first have to consider brand attributes.
This means that customers expect that your tone of voice is the same over email, your website, customer service, and every other touchpoint in your business. If you rebrand, you need to change your logo, and styling everywhere both online and offline. Make sure you create a consistent brand so that your customers revel in your omni-channel presence.
What are brand attributes?
Just like people have their own unique combinations of personality traits, brands have unique attributes, as well. Attributes are identifiers that consumers see as part of a brand. These can include the name and tagline, colors, or even music or sounds often associated with the brand. In addition, attributes can be the feeling that a brand evokes. Example “feeling” attributes include authentic, innovative, dependable, honest, or transparent.
Three things to remember in brand marketing
Brand marketing can be overwhelming, both for new and established brands. The following are three things marketers should remember when it comes to brand marketing.
1. Remember branding and marketing are different. A company’s brand is its personality – marketing is how the company shares that personality with consumers.
2. Spend time on research or measurement. Without due diligence to know how a brand’s peers are positioned, it’s difficult to differentiate the brand. And without proper marketing attribution, it’s challenging to know if a brand moved the needle or not. Spending time on both research and measurement will help define strategy and success for your brand.
3. Show brand attributes (instead of telling). A company may want to position its brand as trustworthy – but it shouldn’t say that it’s a trustworthy brand. Instead, it should show trustworthiness through reliable products and customer service.
Brand marketing is about emphasizing strengths of a brand in order to give it staying power for the long-term. It focuses on strengthening relationships between brands and consumers, and when done most effectively, it is used in concert with marketing activities to establish defining attributes for the brand that helps foster brand advocacy and loyalty.