Most B2B brands these days have great curb appeal, but the house is a disaster.

Let me take a step back.

We all know that historically brand and creative have been considered arts and crafts departments at a lot of companies. An idea/project/campaign would come up. The work would get done in a silo then it’d get thrown over the fence to design or creative to be made “pretty”. That was a big part of what made most B2B content undifferentiated and disjointed depending on the source.

Eventually “brand” started playing a bigger part in B2B but there was confusion around what a brand actually was. Was it your logo, colors, and typography? Was it your billboards and TV commercials? Was it your values, voice, tone? And that was why depending on who you asked, what job req you responded to, or what CMO you spoke to you’d get a different answer.

So today I want to definitively define brand, branding, and brand marketing because they are not the same…

Gold jacket, green jacket, who gives a…

So let’s go back to the house for a second because I think it’s a great way of explaining the three.

What is Branding?

Branding is your curb appeal. It’s also the big one that gets confused with brand and we did it to ourselves. We could’ve called it identity or image but instead we added -ing to the word and did this to ourselves.

Branding is your collection of visual or audio elements that define your brand. It’s your logo, tagline, colors, typography, illustrations, icons, mascots, photography, shapes, sounds (BADUM! anyone?). In B2C maybe there’s a signature fragrance or something but I doubt your CRMs smell like anything.

Color is a really important part of branding

Branding is what you use to look good in front of your audience. It’s how you grab their attention and bring them in.

What is Brand Marketing?

Brand marketing is how you get more people to come look at your house. More plainly this is how you bring your brand to life externally usually with paid budget. That’s why the assumption around brand marketing is that it’s just billboards, TV, transit ads, and sometimes events (I’m 50/50 on this one, I guess it depends on the goal of the event).

Yes, the goal is to create awareness but it’s also to share your values and create intrigue. Without that it’s much harder to convert awareness into actual intent.

An example of brand marketing

In my experience, most Head of Brand roles are actually Head of Brand Marketing roles.

What is Brand?

Brand is the foundation. It’s the plumbing. It’s the wiring. It’s the strategy and point-of-view your house should be built on. It’s the systems that allow you to create differentiated branding and provide you with an effective message to promote through brand marketing.

I think my hottest take about brand is that it’s actually not meant for external audiences, it’s for internal enablement. I don’t think Brand should live within Marketing because your brand needs to be a part of your product and sales motion and customer success. When brand exists only in marketing, you create a disjointed experience. And besides, that’s why you have a brand marketing function, isn’t it? To market your brand??

The entire Modus Create brand, their visual identity, and their systems were built off of this POV

Brand’s job is to help everyone tell the company’s story. Sometimes it’s through process and guidelines, sometimes it’s through tools like Canva, sometimes it’s with emerging technology (somebody has to make sure all this AI is working, right?).

At the end of the day, it’s about helping everyone at your company speak the same language, so let’s start with making sure everyone from the CEO down understands the difference between these three.

TL;DR: brand vs branding vs brand marketing

Not sure if you have a brand or branding? Check out the OhSnap! Brand Systems Audit. It’s an opportunity for us to come in and help you figure out what’s standing in your way of scaling—because we don’t know what we don’t know.

Announcing the OhSnap! Brand Systems Audit

Before you jump into that next rebrand, website rebuild, or buy that next piece of software, let us help you figure out if you actually need it.