How did “Brand vs. Marketing” become a thing?

I’m sure you’ve noticed all of the recent posts on LinkedIn trying to distinguish ‘brand’ from ‘marketing,’ often with a lament that today’s data-driven marketers are trying to do brand tasks (read: badly) and that brand-builders and marketers need to ‘stay in their lane’ to ensure the best branding and marketing outcomes. The posts are often well written — witty even — and I’ll assume well intentioned — but most sacrifice any thoughtful examination of current trends in favor of semantics. While it’s true that branding and marketing are different, these posts conclude that brands and the creativity that sustains them is being undone (or undercut, under-appreciated, etc.) by the triple-threat of agency consolidation, consulting firms buying brand agencies, and data-driven marketers bringing branding in-house. But the consultants and in-house marketing teams didn’t harm brands and brand builders; to the contrary, marketers are using data and technology to make brand building more effective, and collaboration across these disciplines is vital to building great brands and delivering marketing results.

Many of the posts get the history right — technology was an accelerant to agency consolidation and the rise (and importance) of consulting firms in what was traditionally looked at as brand building. This thought even rose to pop culture fame with the IBM 390’s impact on the Sterling Cooper agency in Mad Men —but its proponents never really recognized that any business of scale, looking to build a brand in a digital age, needed to look at their internal talent, tech and processes to be effective. That’s where the consulting firms crushed, and marketers needed them more and more to succeed. Savvy and nimble brand agencies adopted consulting frameworks (or grew in-house offerings) to adjust to this reality, as any brand strategist who’s slogged through building a ‘consumer journey’ can attest. Consulting firms may have acquired brand agencies, but it’s too soon to conclude that cost-driven consulting bosses will gut the brand agencies that grow their reputation with clients, and the recent success of Accenture’s Droga5 and Deloitte’s Heat suggest creative agencies have plenty of room to build great brands.

So much for the ‘consultants ruin brands’ argument. How about the ‘digital makes marketers focus on tactics, not brands’ argument? Well, the data still show great brands deliver great value to shareholders, and marketers know that differentiated brands are built with brand creative partners and a kick-ass in-house team executing across channels. Some may not get it right and in-house too much; others may be unable to execute and live up to the customer expectations their brand campaigns generate. Some ‘stay in your lane’ complaints are understandable — don’t argue that an ad created entirely with Facebook’s automated system is ‘high-end branding,’ but don’t also argue that a brand strategist, armed with customer research data, knows a businesses’ customers as well as those who’ve marketed to those customers for 20+ years. This ‘small-ball’ whining miss the broader point — modern brand-building involves good branding partners and marketing operations that generate response and insights — from salespeople, social media platforms, and customer service reps. Not sexy enough for a cable miniseries, but it’s the truth…

Where is the ‘brand vs. marketing’ debate heading? There will always be a certain degree of lamentation from brand builders who see short-term digital marketing KPIs as the enemy of creative excellence. But today’s brands are increasingly defined and controlled by customers, not by brand managers; in this riskier and more complex marketing context, the ‘brand vs. marketing’ argument is at best a conceptual distraction. Effective marketing operations, however, with brand building partners helping to challenge stagnant thinking and improve customer relationships, is vital. So the ‘brand vs. marketing’ explanation is a simplification (imagine finding a nuanced topic overly-simplified on social media!) that ignores how these two disciplines are so inter-related that they are more siamese twins than siblings or cousins. The sooner we recognize this symbiosis, and respect both disciplines for what they contribute, the sooner today’s digital marketers will be better brand-builders.