Branding vs. Advertising

Lately, we’ve been talking about what is Brand Marketing (Branding for short). When I tell someone we do brand marketing, they usually respond in two ways – “Cool” or “Isn’t that the same thing as advertising or marketing?” But it is important that business owners and managers recognize that advertising, marketing and brand marketing are all very different approaches to your market and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Since we generally discuss branding, let’s talk about advertising and marketing (we’ll focus next week on traditional marketing).

Advertising is communicating via mass media such as TV, radio, outdoor, and web where it hits a broad audience and is generally short lived. Advertising’s strength is in the sheer mass of people that see it and its frequency – we can all think of an ad we’ve seen too many times. Where it’s strength is its broad reach that is also its downfall. Unless you have a product or service for the masses, advertising should not be your primary vehicle to reach prospective buyers. For Coke, Chevy and Sears, it works since they sell to almost everyone. However, if you are an engineer that works on university theaters or a construction company that builds football stadiums, advertising to the masses is just a waste of money since only one out of a million people that see your ad are in the position to buy your service. We do not see much advertising in the A/E/C (Architecture/Engineering/Construction) industry unless a company is hiring a large number of workers. In that case, you want to hit the masses to get the most qualified applicants and instead of one in a million being your audience, it is probably one in 1,000-10,000. Much better odds.

Sometimes larger companies will use advertising just to keep their name out there positioning them as a “household name” people easily recognize. This is using advertising as a vehicle for your brand marketing. Companies do this because they know their buyers prefer to buy from a company they have heard of and feel good about hiring.

Advertising’s other strength is in the timing. If you are a new company or need to hiring those workers quickly, advertising can get your message out quickly and then be turned off when you don’t need it. This is in juxtaposition to branding, which is about slow, steady growth built over time.

Because of advertising’s broad reach, many people call it the shotgun approach. A shotgun shoots a wide spread of pellets hoping they’ll hit something as opposed to a rifle that shoots a single pellet aimed at a very specific target.

Can you think of another good time to use advertising in the B-to-B advertising world?