Do you consider branding and marketing to be of equal value?
Hi IH community! I've been pondering this and would love any and all feedback about your opinion on branding. What it is (and isn't), why it's important (or not) and how you see it in relation to marketing? Already loving the conversations I'm having around this so thought I'd open it up to everyone!
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Hi Meri, this is an interesting question you are asking.
I would say on a high level we can define the terms as such:
Let me explain the point about promises.
As a brand you set expectations ("brand helps [customers] to [verb] via [noun]")
Customers interact with a brand through touchpoints: an ad; an email; a product interaction; an interaction with a customer service representative; another customer's review/blog about the brand; etc...
You see, branding includes a lot of different things.
At the end of the day stripe tries to remain consistent with the expectations they set (== the promise).
I have an online course about this topic but if you read the blog posts/excerpts at the bottom of the page you should get the gist for free :)
Here's the link to the posts: https://www.artlapinsch.com/brand-strategy-workshop/
This is my own uninformed opinion. I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm a techie.
For me, branding is valuable when you have a hope of being remembered and/or recognized. You will be probably making north of $1M ARR before that happens because people just can't remember that many brands. By that time you'll be spending $100k in marketing a year, because that's what would be driving sales or adoption.
For me, branding needs to be good enough so that someone is not repealed when they get hit by my marketing. Spending any more money/resources on improving branding at this point is not worth it.
This is so helpful to hear, thank you! Definitely don't play yourself down, being a techie doesn't mean you can't have a valid viewpoint here - I'd love to understand a bit about what you consider to be branding since you mentioned a couple of really interesting points. Being 'remembered' and being 'hit by marketing' in particular. Would you be willing to expand on that a little?
What do you feel are key components to being remembered?
And when you think of hitting your audience with marketing, what does this look like?
I don't know if I have good answers, but let me try. Some time ago I saw an ad for a product to remove stripped screw. That was marketing, it was an ad, it made me want to buy the product. If I start looking for that product, I can find a bunch of nameless brands and I can find Bosch and Makita. Bosch and Makita spent a lot of time in cultivating being a company that only produces high quality products. That's branding, I remember their names, I may search for them. Branding is a form of marketing but it has the longest lead time.
What I refer by being hit by marketing is being exposed to an ad about the product, a piece of content marketing, some social media, etc.
Apple is famous for having pure-branding marketing campaigns (Think Different). Coca Cola also has pure-branding marketing.
There's also some overlap. Stripe sponsoring a hackathon to build apps that use Strip is both branding (Stripe loves devs) and non-branding marketing (helped created another customer).
This is great thank you so much - I'm trying to understand what tech founders consider to be branding and what is and is not important for their businesses. This is all really helpful data!