Do you really know the difference between Branding, Marketing and Advertising?

Possibly you already know the difference between these three very basic concepts, but since I have come across some large companies where the meaning of these terms is confused, that is why I have decided to summarize them in this article.

If we made a visual comparison to explain it, the best way to start would be to use the Russian matryoshka dolls, where the branding would be the big doll and the rest of the marketing would be a smaller one within the big one, and within this other one would be the communication, and within this other advertising.

While branding is the soul of the brand or how consumers will perceive our brand, marketing is the set of actions that following an objective defined by a strategy "make the market", as I explained in my previous article, open the market by defining our products and promoting them, serving sellers as a support tool that facilitates reaching the final consumer.

Marketing must always follow a strategy under the umbrella of branding, that is, you can never overlook or change the branding strategy for a marketing strategy.

It may seem easy to confuse where each of the two starts and ends, but it's actually easier than it seems to see this difference.

The objective of branding is to take care of our image, our presence, where we appear and how we appear, what we say, our tone in communication, while marketing aims to increase sales, make our product visible, satisfy consumer needs, somehow create the need in the consumer to want our product and also has the objective of building loyalty, creating and strengthening a relationship with the consumer, creating a link between both, and this is the part where marketing and branding are more united, almost holding hands as in a love song.

But despite this, they are two different objectives, strategies, and techniques that, although they complement each other, have other objectives.

Advertising is one of the communication tools that both branding and marketing can use, but as with these two previous ones, we can say that it also applies to advertising, the objective is different.

Depending on our objective and the defined strategy, we can use a wide variety of tools within the set of techniques that make up advertising.

We can choose, in summary, between these four:

ATL

BTL

DIGITAL

TTL



They may seem the same at some point and they can become confused since the line that separates them is sometimes very fine, but each one has its own peculiarities, so depending on the objective, these communication tools will help us reach our target of a creative way, optimizing the resources for communication.

As I said at the beginning, it may seem very basic, but it is important to be clear about the difference between these terms in order to apply them creatively and achieve success.

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