Brand Marketing Guide: 5 Core Objectives of Brand Marketing
Written by MasterClass
Last updated: Jan 6, 2022 • 3 min read
A good brand marketing strategy focuses on creating brand awareness, brand equity, and brand positioning to build a sustainable emotional connection between the brand and the consumer.
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What Is Brand Marketing?
Brand marketing is a type of marketing strategy that focuses on building a relationship between a company's brand and consumers. The goal of brand marketing is to increase the value of a brand, also known as brand equity. Unlike product marketing, which promotes individual products or services, brand marketing promotes the overall brand. Brand marketing can rely on a host of marketing channels, including social media marketing, paid advertising, and digital marketing. A good brand marketing strategy creates a strong brand identity, raises brand awareness, establishes a brand position, tells a compelling brand story, and encourages customer loyalty.
5 Core Objectives of Brand Marketing
Effective brand marketing campaigns will include specific initiatives unique to a particular business. However, there are a few objectives all successful brand marketing strategies have in common.
- 1. Create a strong brand identity. Brand identity, also known as brand image, is essentially a brand’s personality and the cornerstone of a brand marketing plan. It encapsulates the brand name, taglines, tone of voice, logo design, color palette, fonts, and image styles, among other brand identifiers. When brand building, it's important for brand managers and designers to develop clear brand guidelines. Guidelines help ensure the brand identity remains consistent. The goal of crafting a strong brand identity is to generate wider brand recognition and differentiate the brand from competitors.
- 2. Raise brand awareness. Brand awareness, also called brand recognition, is a metric that gauges how familiar consumers are with a brand name or product. Market research allows you to better understand your target market and craft fictional brand personas that represent your target customers. Once you know who your target audience is, you can build brand awareness by tailoring your messaging to specific demographics and disseminating those messages via your available marketing channels.
- 3. Establish brand positioning. Identifying market differentiation is crucial for creating an effective brand marketing campaign. A great brand position that promotes the uniqueness of your brand is essential in order to capture a larger market share from your competitors. When brand marketers successfully convey that a product has more desirable features and addresses a need better than other products, they create buzz around the brand that's hard for consumers to ignore.
- 4. Tell a compelling brand story. Your brand story tells the consumer why you do what you do and communicates your brand's values. A comprehensive content marketing strategy can help you communicate your values to the consumer and help you develop an authentic story that resonates with your audience.
- 5. Develop customer loyalty. Brand marketing is all about long-term goals, which include customer retention. While conversion (acquiring new customers) is important, loyal customers provide a dependable customer base. A successful brand marketing campaign will work to establish trust between your brand and the consumer. It's not enough to simply tell the consumer that you're trustworthy—you have to prove your trustworthiness by being honest and consistent in your brand messaging.
Brand Marketing vs. Product Marketing: What’s the Difference?
Brand marketing and product marketing are different types of marketing strategies.
- Brand marketing: Brand marketing focuses on establishing a relationship between a company's brand and consumers. The marketing strategy focuses on advertising the brand as a whole rather than individual products or services.
- Product marketing: Product marketing focuses on promoting a specific product or service provided by a business. Product marketing is often employed to accomplish short-term goals to sell new products, whereas brand marketing employs long-term goals to develop brand loyalty. That said, a brand marketing strategy could involve highlighting products or services as part of the messaging to promote the overall brand.
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