Branding or Marketing. Which one should you go for? : The Ultimate Dilemma of Start-ups

Branding and marketing are the two most convoluted and often interchanged terms in the realm of marketing. While so many businesses, in the light of digital marketing, opt to market their business digitally, they forget branding entirely.

The reason is a lack of awareness among start-ups and businesses. We’re here to clear the air around these interchanged terms.

What is branding?

The flesh and bones of your business, i.e., how your business looks, how it feels to the customer, and most importantly, what the customer perceives about your business, are what falls under branding. Branding is usually done to make sure your business is perceived the way you want it to be. For instance, if you own a coffee shop, you might want to sell coffees that wake the soul from within people. Now, to make sure your message reaches your customer, you have to come up with a logo, writing, design, website, and a whole lot of identity elements. It won’t be wrong to say that branding is a strategy. A strategy that decides how your brand, if it were a human, would walk, talk, and behave. This is why branding elements, when put together, are known as brand architecture.

Certain brands don’t want to invest in their mission and vision statements. According to a study, “92 Percent of Consumers Visiting a Retailer’s Website for the First Time Aren’t There to Buy.”

This pearl-clutching decision of not investing in mission and vision statements could bring harm to the brand. People who visit your website will definitely buy from you if they perceive you as a trustworthy brand.

To get a better idea of what are the questions one might need to answer about branding, here’s a list:

How do you want your audience to see your brand?
What is the mission of your brand?
What is the vision of your brand?
Marketing

Remember the coffee shop you owned minutes ago in this article? Yeah, we’re talking about the example taught above. Imagine you have a coffee shop; you’ve created a brand identity for yourself, and customers are impressed with it. They’ve now started to pour into your cafe. Alas, you’re not prepared to serve their dream coffee. Why? Because you haven’t bought the tools needed to deliver a soul-waker coffee at such a pace.

The use of tools in any business is part of a marketing campaign. No matter which business you have, which field of business you’re interested in, or which part of branding you’re focused the most on, you will eventually need marketing to make sure whatever you’ve created reaches your audience.

Marketing is a laser-focused job that is done while keeping several things in mind. Factors such as customer sentiments, emotions, budget, economy, and budget are important to consider before launching various marketing campaigns.

The best way to understand this is that your coffee business will do best during winters, but to make sure it does equally well during summers, selling items like cold coffee, frappes, etc, will help you sail through the entire year.

Marketing might come up in various formats, such as
Content Marketing
Copywriting
SEO/SMM
Email marketing

Which comes first?

However, the answer is self-explanatory; we would still like to explain. Take the coffee shop, for example. What would you do first? Design an identity or start marketing your business right away when it’s raw? Of course, branding. You’d take time to decide on your brand architecture. Once you’ve set your foot down on branding image, you can continue marketing it.

We hope your dilemma has come to an end with this blog.

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