Brand vs marketing – where to allocate budget?

When getting your business out to customers, there are two major things to think about; your brand and your marketing, and they are two separate, yet interconnected things, branding expert Tom Livingstone explains.

When allocating budget to brand, you’re investing in your identity: logos, fonts and underlying strategy – figuring out who your customers are and how you’re going to connect with them. 

Branding is creating the (physical or digital) shop front. Marketing, on the other hand, is about promoting that shop front to get customers through the door. 

Whether you have a large budget or not, if you try to cut corners with marketing and don’t have a strong brand behind it, marketing spend can become a black hole. You might want to skip straight to getting in front of people and driving results through marketing, but if they’re not seeing anything interesting from you, it’s easy to keep spending money and end up wasting it.

Preventing wasted efforts

That waste can be limitless, especially given the platforms available to market on. Meta, for example, wants you to spend more on advertising and will encourage you to do so. But that’s not always the most valuable use of your budget.

You can spend money on lots of different things and define them as marketing. Broadly speaking, it’s anything that puts your brand in front of more people.

Spending money on instant return activities like paid ads is one way of doing that. Then there’s more traditional and involved marketing, such as billboards, TV adverts and event sponsorship. It can even include spending money on the product itself, as marketing touches product and pricing as well as just promotion.

In terms of knowing when to invest in one or the other, you might feel that you have a really strong brand but you’re not getting any traction. To me, that suggests you might need a little nudge from marketing to get in front of enough people. On the other hand, if you’re spending money on marketing and not getting much joy from it – or much traction – that might be an indicator to look at the brand and ask whether it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.

Long- and short-term goals

Brand building is a long-term activity, whereas marketing is often more short term. It takes time to build a reputation. You don’t create that overnight. You need to continually shape how people see you. That’s the long-term play with branding. Marketing, meanwhile, is the short-term, more active nudge of saying, “Look at this. Do you want to buy it?” This is more of a temporary market manipulation: if you stop doing it, customers stop acting on it.

To some extent, it depends on your goals. If a company simply wants to sell lots of products or services tomorrow, investing in its brand isn’t going to achieve that.

The stronger a business’s brand, the more momentum it can build organically, and people will start coming to it. But a new logo isn’t going to make more people buy from the business tomorrow. On the other hand, you could set up a series of Facebook ads encouraging people to buy something and potentially drive a surge in sales overnight. That’s the short-term approach.

The question then becomes: if your goals are short term, what are your long-term goals? If you’re only marketing products and then switch off all the ads encouraging people to buy them, what happens the next day? Without those ads running, people may stop buying.

The connection between brand and marketing

A business spending heavily on marketing without seeing a significant return should probably question the brand itself. Whatever marketing activity you’re investing in is likely to perform better if it’s supported by a strong brand. 

That doesn’t just mean looking good; it also means understanding who you need to put your message in front of and ensuring it’s communicated effectively.

That’s all part of branding: understanding your audience and how to communicate with them. When that thinking feeds into your marketing, it’s naturally going to be more effective because you’ve spent more time considering who your customer is and what they want to see.

Anything that gets you noticed is marketing. There are plenty of obvious marketing channels, but it’s arguably harder to stand out if you’re sticking to the standard playbook of Facebook or LinkedIn ads. It’s a saturated market and everyone is doing it. If you can find a lane that other people aren’t using, it’s much easier to become memorable as the company that’s doing something different.

Before making decisions about how to spend your branding and marketing budget, ask yourself: what do I want to achieve? What are my goals? What challenges is my business facing?

If your goal is to sell a large volume of products within six months, you’re probably going to prioritise marketing spend in the short term because it’s difficult to build a brand in that timeframe. But if your goal is to dominate your category over the next ten years, you’re never going to achieve that without building a strong brand.