Your Brand Is More Than Marketing

A lot of organizations use “branding” and “marketing” like they mean the same thing. They’re connected, but they do different jobs, and mixing them up can leave an organization polishing its marketing while the real problem goes untouched.

Here’s how I define them. Your brand is the visual and in-person representation of your organization, the message you communicate, the strategy you use to get people in the door, and how you want to make an impact and be remembered. Marketing is how you share that brand: the ways you bring it to life, and the everyday actions that carry it out into the world.

Seth Godin describes a brand as “the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships” that lead someone to choose one option over another.

Good marketing can’t fix an unclear brand

You can build a polished campaign, refresh the website, redesign the slide deck, or post more consistently. But if people still can’t tell what makes your organization meaningful, the problem probably isn’t the marketing calendar. It’s the story underneath it.

Too often, people think that if they change the look, feel, and creative identity of their organization, they’ve changed their brand. They haven’t. As Godin puts it, “Design is essential but design is not brand.” The creative is one element of the brand, but the story, the foundation, and the values of the organization are what fuel it. That’s the brand. It’s the thing that gets people to come back and the thing that builds loyalty. People may find new creative attractive and eye-catching, but to stay, they need to connect with what’s deeper, under the surface.

The brand lives in the experience

Visual identity helps people recognize you, but recognition is only one piece. Your brand also shows up in the messages you repeat, the experiences you create, the way people are treated, and any gap between what you say and what people actually experience.

An event promotion is marketing. The experience at the event becomes part of the brand. A recruitment campaign is marketing. The way someone is treated after they say they’re interested becomes part of the brand. A social post is marketing. The values and personality it communicates become part of the brand.

That’s why a brand can’t be handed off to one person with a design program. Marketing and branding are everyone’s responsibility, because everyone in the organization is shaping the experience people have with it.

Assess before you create

Before asking, “How do we market this?” it helps to take an honest look at where you are. In my Sharing OUR Story sessions, we start with a few questions about the brand itself:

• Do we actually have a brand, or just a logo?

• Can our own people describe it in a way that sounds connected?

• When someone encounters us, do they know who we are and what we’re about?

Then a few about the marketing:

• In what ways are we bringing our brand to life right now?

• Is it consistent across the organization?

• What techniques do we lean on most, and which are we ignoring that we shouldn’t be?

The answers usually show whether the next step is a better marketing plan or a clearer story. Often it’s the story.

Start with what you want people to understand

Once you’ve assessed where you are, go back to the most basic question: what story are we trying to tell? What do we want people to understand about our purpose, our value, and our impact? What should they remember after an interaction with us?

When those answers are clear, marketing becomes less about creating disconnected pieces of content and more about reinforcing something consistent. That doesn’t mean everything has to look or sound identical. It means the pieces should belong to the same story.

When your message, your visuals, and the experience people actually have reinforce one another, people don’t just recognize your organization. They understand it.