Dear Tig: The Difference Between Marketing and Branding, Product Managers Vs. Product Marketing Managers, and Grouping Brands
by Tig Tillinghast

** Tig's weekly column fields questions from and for marketers. **

Dear Tig, What really is the difference between marketing and branding?

Thanks, - Told Many Things

Dear TMT,

Whenever I get into definitions of branding, I get angry letters back from marketing professors in Europe, who have very specific ideas of what everyone else should use as the definition. Where people who teach marketing may be most concerned with the ontology of marketing--how you can organize the different concepts--practitioners most often apply the definitions that best apply to the different services they sell to clients.

So you understand my own bias, I'm in the latter group.

(As the distance between these academic perceptions and what practicing people are using in the field have proven amusing, I would be sorely disappointed to see les professeurs cease their vigilance.)

The point is, people will tell you different definitions, depending on the purpose of the definition.

Marketing is the public presentation of a company, product or service to an audience for the purpose of trying to further the goals of the company. This translates most often into selling stuff, but also includes activities like trying to create goodwill or this elusive category of marketing: branding.

Branding is the cumulative effect in the minds of the public that creates the impression of a personality or set of qualities associated with the company, product or service. It's often done deliberately, but also includes the effects of unintended associations.

My favorite example is the Lysol advertisements seen on the doors of the New Jersey Route 95 bathrooms. I'm sure somewhere there's a Lysol brand manager who--perhaps never having been to these facilities--thought it was a great idea. But people having to subject themselves to these seemingly-germ-infested nether regions know that it's about the worst place possible to put the message “These premises cleaned with Lysol.”

Everything affects the brand--whether it be the product packaging, advertising, transaction process, what people's friends say about it, and especially the proximity of unclean toilets in a New Jersey rest area.

You can control marketing, and you can deliberately “do” branding, but few companies ever have the luxury of completely controlling the brand.

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Dear Tig, What is the difference between a Product Manager and a Product Marketing Manager?

Thanks, - European Product Manager

Dear EPM,

I'm reluctant to be too definitive when describing job titles, as they tend to vary greatly from region to region, and here in the US, we've spent the last 10 years botching them all together and finding different meanings for everything. A director of something here is considered a middle manager, where director is often the title of the chief executive officer of a firm in the UK.

More recently, it's become the trend for relatively senior people to create their own titles, almost as conversation pieces. I've had foisted on myself the titles of Agency Czar and Benevolent Factor. To test the limits of this, with a straight face I once even told a believing editor of a media magazine that my title was “aesthete.”

That said, the difference between product manager and product marketing manager traditionally has been an issue of scope. The product manager was most often someone who had wider responsibilities, including product development, customer service and channel distribution. The product marketing manager has most often been someone more focused, not surprisingly, on marketing.

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Dear Tig, Does the grouping of brands really work out?

Thanks, - Brand Groupie

Dear Groupie,

Sometimes grouping brands together does work out -- creating messaging and media efficiencies. But it takes some discipline.

But companies sometimes like to group brands together in their communications merely because it happens to reflect the political structure of the company itself. This usually winds up introducing an unnecessary clutter into the messaging: “Buy Flutz Soap; a subsidiary of Dirty Oil Corp., Petroleum Distillates Division.”

Other times, groupings can create useful brands in and of themselves. Some large American “beer” companies have divisions for their smaller brands, allowing them to live in a good tasting beer world without the association with what I consider to be the terrible-tasting flagship brands.

I think the key determinant as to whether such a grouping will succeed comes in the answer to this question: “Is the grouping of brands being determined by the need to react to market perceptions or is it an effort to better organize the company?”