During the time my wife and I owned our advertising firm many of our customers struggled to understand the difference between marketing, branding, advertising and public relations. So, let me start with explaining the difference.
Marketing: The strategy your business uses to reach your target market. This includes branding, advertising and public relations.
The goal of marketing is to deliver a specific message to your “ideal customer.”
Branding: The emotions, feelings and perceptions your customers have about your organization, products and services. Elements of branding include; logo, style, color, typeface, tone of message, photography and the design of every aspect of your business, including your location, your facilities, how your employees dress, your products, services, pricing and more. The key to branding is consistency, you want your brand to look and feel the same across all the various media platforms.
The goal of branding is to create loyalty among your target customers.
Advertising: Paid messaging that is designed to persuade people to do business with you. This includes print advertising, radio, billboards, magazines, trade shows, events, social media, direct mail, specials, discounts, loyalty programs and more.
The goal of advertising is to increase sales.
Public Relations: This is typically “non-paid” promotions about your business and brand. This includes press releases, awards, articles written about your business/product/services, supporting local charities, speeches, interviews and more.
The goal of public relations is to foster positive affiliations with your organization.
Examples of strong brands:
- Harley-Davidson
- Coca-Cola
- Microsoft
- Apple
- Mercedes-Benz
- BMW
- Volvo
- Starbucks
- McDonald’s
- The New York Yankees
- The New England Patriots
- The Florida Gators
Each of these brands have strong emotions, history, imagery, reputation and extremely loyal customers. For many of these organizations the value of their brand exceeds the total value of the actual company! Good branding can help build the loyalty, word-of-mouth referrals, revenues and profitability of your business – a bad brand image can destroy your business.
Be brutally honest. What is the current brand of your business? If I were to talk to some of your current customers and potential customers, what, specifically, would they say about your business? What are the actual words that would use to describe your business to someone else? Here are a few areas for you to explore.
What would people say about…
- Your facilities: clean, attractive, good location, easy to find what you need, welcoming atmosphere versus dirty, disorganized, confusing or uncomfortable.
- Your employees: professional, courteous, great customer service, strong product knowledge, clean and well-groomed appearance, wearing an approved “uniform” versus sloppy, unprofessional, little to no product knowledge, wearing whatever they want to or mediocre customer service.
- Your advertising: professional, consistent, attractive, persuasive versus aggressive, pushy and focused mostly on low price.
- Your reputation in the community: friendly, good community citizen, supports local charities, good representative of the business community versus not well —known, does not support local charities not involved in the local business community.
If I were to ask your current customers to describe your business and six words or less, what would they say?
In a perfect world, what would you love for your customers and potential customers to say about your business?
Now, to see how well you are doing against how you perceive your own brand, I challenge you to go to several of your best customers and ask them this question:
Why, specifically, do you do business with us? What are the top three or four reasons you chose our company?
After you talk to several ideal customers, a pattern will emerge, and that pattern is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), the reason they buy from you instead of your competition. Once you have clearly identified your USP it should become the focus of all of your marketing, branding, advertising and public relations.
To sum it up:
- A great product with bad marketing is unknown in the marketplace.
- A bad product with great marketing destroys customer trust and the brand
- A great product with a solid marketing strategy that is consistent, clear and based on the USP is a fundamental element of creating a successful business.
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John Spence has been recognized as one of the top 100 business thought leaders and as one of the top 500 leadership development experts in the world. He is an international keynote speaker and management consultant and has written five books on business and life succes. Visit: www.johnspence.com.