But over the years time grew scarce and devices broke (I miss my drum kit) and the whole genre kinda disappeared only to resurge in the past year or so. I’d watch videos on Youtube and get the itch. Then ad targeting got the best of me and I bought these Riffmaster guitars for me and the wife along with Rock Band 4 for PS5.

It’s been so much fun and the kids are into it as well. If there are any players in audience let’s play online!

Earlier this week I’m scrolling through Linkedin and I see this great post by Gwen Lafage (she’s an immediate follow for all of you). The post was about how marketers try to turn brand into something it’s not. This quote in particular stuck with me:

I sat with that spreadsheet line for a long time this week and it helped reinforce an idea I’ve held for years now, brand doesn’t belong in marketing. At least not in today’s version of B2B marketing that prioritizes short term thinking.

It’s time to get brand out of marketing

Why is short term thinking bad?

It’s not per se because if you can’t survive in the short term then what’s the point of thinking long term? The issue is that when you’re only focused on the short term it becomes “how we do it here.”

With short term thinking everything is a rush, there’s no space for good work, and prioritization doesn’t really happen. This is when the brand team becomes a production studio. Their job isn’t elevating the work, it’s cranking it out. This is when the brand team becomes an arts and crafts team. This is what I want to avoid.

Why is arts and crafts bad?

The goal of a strong brand is to create a moat for your business. It’s the differentiator that no one elsecan compete with. It’s your unique identity: how you dress, your personality, your values, likes and dislikes. The job is to then take those things and organically make them a part of every aspect of your business.

A team that’s focused solely on production isn’t looking ahead. They’re just trying to survive the day.

Brand vs Brand Marketing

So real quick, I want to provide a clear distinction between brand and brand marketing because they are not the same thing—and I’m not writing about the latter today. When I say brand, yes I’m talking about the branding (logo, colors, typography, etc.) but I’m also talking about the underlying strategy that every company needs to stand on their own and provide unique experiences for their customers. This includes your unique POV, your brand story, your design system, your brand tech stack.

This is the work that benefits every member of the company because it provides them with clarity around why your offer matters and why you’re different from the competition—it ain’t your product features. While the ultimate goal is for your customers to be the beneficiaries of this work, it’s your colleagues that get first dibs.

On the other hand, brand marketing is a discipline that takes your brand to market (see what I mean about your colleagues getting first dibs?). They’re measured on awareness, sentiment, impressions, clicks, ROI, and all the same marketing metrics as performance (although they rarely get the same budget) and they share your brand POV outwardly. That’s one of the best ways to think about it actually, brand focuses internally, brand marketing focuses externally. Sometimes the same people oversee these groups but the immediate target audience is different.

So why doesn’t brand belong in marketing?

It’s because brand is bigger than marketing.

There’s this assumption that many orgs make that marketing is the only part of the business that prospects and customer interact with. This perception is why brand typically sits in marketing and probably the biggest reasons why brand shouldn’t sit in marketing. Why? Because it’s 100% false!

What about when your prospects are dealing with sales or CS? What about when they’re exploring your product? What about when someone is applying for a job at your company? The experience goes from super rich to barely hanging on. I’ve seen this at small, private companies and I’ve seen this at behemoth, public companies. When the brand team focuses only on marketing, everything else takes a hit.

On top of that, the brand isn’t built organically, it’s built through bits and pieces from ticket to ticket. This is fine for a bit of time, but I’m pretty confident when I say most of us are trying to build companies that want to stand the test of time. You’re not doing that with short term thinking.

Brand drives the entire company

Brand should sit at the top of a company’s hierarchy next to Finance, Legal, and Ops. All of these departments collaborate closely with their colleagues across the company, none of these departments make money directly—but they do support everyone else in making it.

Seriously, think about it. Does Legal make the company money? Does Ops? Does Finance? Nope! None of them are directly responsible for any ARR but what they do on a daily basis supports marketing and Sales and CS and Growth to make more money. They remove blockers and make the work easier to do.

When done correctly, that’s what a brand does too. It provides the resources and tools to be successful in doing your job AND showing up consistently for your customer.

How does brand support the business?

Making life easier for the team

I don’t necessarily believe that “everybody owns the brand” but I do believe that the brand belongs to everyone. What that means to me is your brand is a tool that enables the whole company (and all of your contractors, freelancers, agencies, and vendors) to do their best work.

That may come through strategy, visual identity, guidelines, or self-service tools, but whatever it is that the team needs, it’s on the brand team to either make, share, or facilitate (through all of your contractors, freelancers, agencies, and vendors).

Facilities needs a logo for a new office space? It’s in the DAM.

You’re launching a new event and it needs a subbrand? That’s a cool collab opportunity.

Launching a new campaign and need to hire a big, sexy agency? We got the guidelines ready to go and a CD who can help!

Brand isn’t sitting around “thinking about strategy,” it’s preparing solutions for the whole company to leverage.

Showing up consistently for your customers

Let’s go back to that assumption that only marketing interacts with your prospects.

Sure, your prospect listened to a podcast, they saw a paid ad, they visited the website. Those are all marketing.

Well, guess what? It worked! Now they want to give you their money. Are they still talking to marketing? Nope. They’re talking to Sales now, maybe there’s a sales engineer in the mix who has to demo the software. Don’t you want their materials to look good while also sharing a consistent message with what they saw from the marketing materials? Of course you do.

Then you convert them, now they’re in the product. Shouldn’t the product look and feel align with marketing? From a functionality standpoint, are you doing the same thing everyone is doing or are you building the platform in a way that highlights your POV?

The product worked (or it didn’t), so now your customer is on the phone with customer success to talk about a renewal (or an issue). CS needs to be on point on the same page as everyone else that customer has interacted with up until that point. Is it an enterprise customer? You know they’re talking to the lawyers.

All of a sudden it went from one team talking to your prospect to six or more. Yes, each of those touch points needs to be able to standalone but they also need to be part of a consistent user journey. If every step along the way looks, feels, and sounds different, you’re gonna confuse the prospect. A confused prospect doesn’t buy. As Lashay says in the video above, “complexity doesn’t sell, simplicity does.”

Dedicated long-term thinking

At the top of this thing I mentioned how today’s B2B marketing is focused on the short term. It’s not that Marketers don’t want to think long term it’s just that the current climate (AI, budgets, economic uncertainty, resourcing issues, and so on) forces teams to think short term. That may get your immediate results but it results in a reactive brand. I don’t know about you but I want to be proactive in my work and control the direction.

You can’t be proactive if you have to jump from project to project without much thought in between. This is why it's so important to separate the two disciplines. The short term will ultimately inform the long term but you also need to be able to step away and evaluate things from a higher vantage point with more data from across more areas of the business. This objectivity only comes from having space.

Does this mean brand and marketing can’t play together?

When I shared this thought on Gwen's post, Jane Serra said something important:

“If we took brand out of marketing I would no longer enjoy what I do. We need the ART, in the art & science of marketing.” -Jane Serra, VP Growth Marketing @ Daxtra

She’s right of course and don’t let my broad generalizations from the first 10 paragraphs of this thing convince you otherwise, not all marketers don’t understand brand. Many of them do and they’re good partners to us. We need to maintain the collaboration with them. And it’s even more important to collaborate with the marketers that are still catching up because it’s on us to show them there’s a better way.

Beyond providing the resources I mentioned above, we should still be assigning creatives to the big projects, we should be learning about the concerns the marketers (and others across the company have), we should be offering our expertise to enhance the work.

This level of collaboration results in huge wins both in the short term and the long term:

That said we should also have people focused on just the brand to continue improving it.

Do we have to split them up?

No, we don’t but if there isn’t room to continue evolving the brand then you don’t have a brand team, you have an arts and crafts team. As a brand leader, ultimately you have to live where they put you but that doesn’t mean that your job is to pump out assets and close tickets. Your job is to evolve the brand.

Enabling a company isn’t light work. It takes a brand system that is rooted in your strategy, supported by your visual identity, and enabled through a strong design system and tech stack. This is what we build at OhSnap!

We make B2B brands not only look good but to show up consistently across the entire customer journey. If today’s newsletter resonated with you and you’re ready to enable your whole company, we’re here to help.