The Difference Between Product Branding and Product Marketing

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[00:00:00] Theresa: Product branding versus product marketing is a thing that people will conflate all of the time, or conversely, don't think they need. And I actually don't think every product needs a brand, but some of them do. If you're having a performance problem with your product, sometimes it's a marketing problem and sometimes it's a product brand problem. Product branding is the story that you're telling for your product. There may be opportunities for it to be an extension of your brand in a different way for it to be a little bit more developed or a little bit more niched or nuanced within the overall brand that you have. This is particularly relevant for OEMs who are marketing directly to the consumers a lot of the time. And then product marketing is just the repeatable marketing tactics that we have to promote the product. It's less about the action of developing a unique story, and it's more about the continued promotion, awareness, and moving people through the funnel related specifically to that product or that product line.

[00:01:15] Theresa: You market products and brands. It's important to do both at different stages of the funnel. It's really important to market the brand at the awareness level. That's how you get on people's radar. That's how you get your total addressable market is just like being in the mindset of people. When you're getting people into the consideration phase and people are actively thinking about buying from you, that's when you want to be educating people about your products and when it's important to have a really strong product brand. And then when you're getting really tactical in those bottom-of-the-funnel sales touchpoints and marketing touchpoints, your product marketing pays off in a more tangible way. This is an exercise we do all the time when we're working on branding projects at the product or the brand level is a communications audit. So you can assemble all of your marketing materials for your specific products and make sure they exist, first of all, at every stage of the consumer touchpoints, and then look and see if they are consistent in their language, in their tone and in their visuals.

[00:02:32] Theresa: If you have a story that's landing in the marketplace, but you're having a volume problem, then that tells you if you need product branding activities or product marketing activities. So if you're in an environment where you have a high volume of products and the choice when consumers are choosing your products just based on a technical spec, it's very rare that you will meet a product brand. People are going to be making a decision to work with you based on the relationships they have with your brand and with your sales team. The products will absorb the OEM brands. And so it's not necessarily worth it if you have 50, 100 plus products to have each of them have a technical brand. There's still education about your specific product benefits you want to do lower in the funnel, but people are making a decision based on the trust that you establish at that brand level rather than a differentiated story you're telling about a specific technical product.

[00:03:43] Theresa: So what does good product marketing look like? Good product marketing is having a consistent story at all phases at the funnel, driving them to web content that's getting them deeper into the technical specifications so they're armed when they go into a dealer lot. And then the dealer is armed with those same materials that's speaking to the same product benefits. And then sales is there to support the dealer in closing that sale and they're supporting them with the same talking points. No consumer goes onto a dealer lot uninformed now. And so the level of specificity and the level of data that they're looking for is increasing and we're experimenting and testing all the time to see what is that right level of detail to arm them with.