Volume 169: Branding vs Marketing.

1. Branding vs Marketing.

tl;dr: How to be flat wrong and totally right at the exact same time.

There’s a trope doing the rounds; it’s been doing so for quite some time, you know the one. Yeah, that one. Where someone on LinkedIn makes the pronouncement that branding is not marketing and then goes on to show a cherry-picked list of the things they label ‘brand’ and things they label ‘marketing,’ and it all looks like a load of old horseshit because they’ve arbitrarily chosen to put the strategically valuable stuff under ‘brand’ and the tactically less valuable stuff under ‘marketing.’ (Note: I’m not picking on the version I linked to in particular; there are loads of variants. This is just the first I found via search)

Then, lo and behold, when you look at what they do for a living, they’re branding people of some stripe or another. Hmmm. Not at all biased, then.

Now, I could be deeply cutting and proclaim that even though I’ve spent a 20+year career in branding, setting up a face-off between brand and marketing is possibly the most nonsensically asinine thing I’ve ever seen, but I shall refrain because there’s a point to this madness. Instead, I’ll explain where it’s coming from and why the folks saying this are both flat wrong and absolutely right at the exact same time.

The root problem is pretty straightforward. It’s the confusion between marketing as a function and marketing as a department. Let me explain.

Marketing as a function is critical to the success of every business, no matter what it might be called and no matter how it might be organized. To borrow from marketing academia, the boundaries of the marketing function are explained by the 4Ps of the marketing mix (I know there have been many variations of the 4Ps over the years, yet the original remains useful). In more detail, this means the Product P, the Place P, the Price P, and the Promotional P. In other words, what you buy, where you buy it, how you know to buy it, and how much it costs you to buy. Marketing as a function is the art and social science of defining and then interlinking these factors with each other in interesting and innovative ways to create something compelling in the market that wins customers and beats the competition.

However, marketing departments rarely have responsibility for the entirety of the marketing mix these days (if they ever did). In oversimplified terms, the trendline over the past couple of decades has been for marketing departments to become heavily focused on the promotional P, while responsibility for the other aspects of the marketing mix are spread elsewhere in the organization. (I know lines are blurrier than this in reality, but please bear with me because it’s easier to explain what’s going on if we assume a neat bifurcation).

As an aside, this is why, when asked about the state of marketing, I often respond by saying the marketing function appears to be in fairly rude health—products getting better, customer experiences getting better, companies getting better at pricing, novel distribution stuff happening, etc. Meanwhile, the marketing department isn’t looking so hot as marketers fight for access to something as basic as MVB (minimal viable budget).

Anyway, when we deconstructed the marketing mix and spread responsibility for the 4Ps around different parts of the organization, we introduced the problem of silo risk. In other words, the marketing mix no longer operates as an interlinked whole, instead being carved into a series of siloed activities that don’t necessarily connect. For example, it’s not uncommon to have a Chief Product Officer in charge of the product, a Chief Financial Officer in charge of pricing, a Chief Marketing Officer in charge of promotion, and an array of different titles in charge of place/distribution depending on the nature of the business you’re in. Not to mention the engineers and the lawyers, who, Dunning Kruger aside, think they’re in charge of everything…

Phew. That’s a lot. And, scarily, it creates the potential for extremely damaging and value-destructive chaos.

Enter the ‘B’ word.

When we deconstruct the marketing mix, it’s hard to use the term marketing to describe it anymore because these folks don’t want to be lumped under ‘marketing,’ especially if marketing in that organization is synonymous with the kind of high-volume, short-term tactics we typically label ‘performance’ or ‘growth marketing.’

So, instead, we tackle the marketing mix through the lens of the brand: how it is positioned, what it stands for, what its vision is, what its experiences are supposed to be like, the capabilities necessary to deliver, etc.

In other words, to avoid the chaos created by deconstructing the marketing mix and to ensure there’s at least some common guidance in managing it, we use the term ‘brand’ as shorthand instead. And that’s just fine.

This brings me to why some branding people are so quick to create an oppositional relationship between branding and marketing. Put simply, those working in the branding field tend to spend their time working with clients in a cross-functional fashion, engaging product people, salespeople, finance people, senior business leaders, engineers, lawyers, and, yes, marketers around the brand. So, how are they likely to think?

Yup, that’s right. They’ll think the brand isn’t marketing; it’s bigger than marketing because their baseline understanding isn’t marketing as a business function but marketing as a comms-focused department.

Are they wrong? Yes, indisputably. But they’re also right because of how we’ve systematically changed what marketing means over the years.

Now, bringing this back to the introductory observation around LinkedIn, we can see why the response to such posts tends to bifurcate into one group screaming about how wrong it is and another screaming that it’s right on point. Depending on your philosophical standpoint, each can be equally right or equally wrong.

My starting point has always been marketing as a business function, where how you frame the brand largely represents an integrated view of the marketing mix. However, such splitting of hairs doesn’t really matter all that much in practical terms because we can easily see what’s going on and navigate accordingly.

At its heart, the navigation that matters is getting everyone onto the same page on whether we have an expansionist view—meaning we use the term ‘brand’ as shorthand for the entirety of the marketing mix—or whether we have a reductionist view—meaning we use brand as a shorthand term for marcomms, messaging, and distinctive assets.

It’s not that one is necessarily right or wrong under any given circumstance. It’s more that you can’t have one group of people working under one definition and another group working under another and hope to have anything approaching success.

2. The Subversive ‘90s.

tl;dr: Nostalgia is a drug.

Like every member of Gen X, I view myself as a child of the ‘90s. I was 16 in 1990 and 26 by the turn of the decade. Although you don’t realize it at the time, these are some of your most critical formative years. You’re single and fancy-free, you explore the vitality of the world around you, your tastes form and begin to harden, and you inevitably conclude that ‘your’ decade was the best decade for music ever. (Except, maybe that doesn’t happen anymore. With the advent of Spotify, my 16-year-old is more likely to listen to Nirvana than any of the ‘crap’ (his words) that’s produced today.)

So, screw the swinging 60s; the music of the ’90s has yet to be beat…

Anyway, because it might interest folks younger than me, I wanted to share this piece on the subversive and nihilistic nature of 1990s advertising.

It brought back many memories. And while I think the author is entirely correct in lamenting the loss of attitude and subversive grit in modern advertising, I can’t help but think of Liquid Death.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but as a brand, Liquid Death is very much a child of the ‘90s, living the subversive dream completely out of its time.

And since nostalgia is such a drug, I wish a few more children of the ‘90s might emerge, or at least that we might cleanse our collective palates after the saccharin sweetness of the purpose years with a lot more edge, attitude, and subversiveness.

3. Impossibly Good.

tl;dr: JKR take a bow.

Ok, I rarely talk about rebrands anymore these days, mainly because it’s pretty rare to see a good one, and as much fun as it is to lambast a terrible rebrand, it also gets boring pretty fast.

So, with great glee, I now get to point you toward something I think is really good for really simple reasons.

Namely, the recent work done by JKR for Impossible Foods. It isn’t good because it’s deep; it’s good because it’s gloriously shallow.

Impossible makes vegetarian meat alternatives in various forms, most notably burgers. It competes with Beyond and an increasingly long list of meat replacement products.

The challenge is that only 5-8% of Americans are vegetarian, which means the market size math simply doesn’t work if, like Impossible, you’ve taken circa $2bn in VC financing, and the expectations are that you’ll deliver exponential supercharged growth.

Instead, the only way to achieve the required scale your investors require is to sell a meat alternative to people who also like to eat meat. This rebrand sets out to do exactly that, and I suspect will do it well.

As I say, it isn’t deep but doesn’t need to be. In fact, it does a great job of being dead-nuts obvious. Presenting Impossible as a whole category offering that moves it past the formulaic and boring minimalism-in-green so common among meat-alternatives-for-vegetarians and instead shifts the whole thing toward a bold, red, and deliberately meaty palate.

And yeah. I’m sure the designers out there will nitpick at it, but this is a really good move in terms of being fit for purpose and directly addressing its biggest commercial challenge.

Of course, it doesn’t mean Impossible will be successful. There’s a long road ahead; meat alternative sales have slowed as competition intensifies, and meat prices have begun falling back toward sanity. At some point, the business will need to stand on its own two feet. And while I’m normally highly skeptical of 'Hail Mary’ rebrands, this one has some obvious logic to it.

So, yeah. Well done JKR. You’re rapidly turning into a powerhouse of CPG branding, and oh goodness me, did somebody need to take on that mantle.