The Most Helpful, Biggest and Oldest Full-Service Lafayette, Indiana Marketing Firm Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

Marketing vs. Branding vs. Advertising

Let’s all get on the same page about the meaning of – and relationship – between marketing, branding, and advertising. Because these three terms are all related to the sales side of your company’s operation, they can be intermingled and confused with each other. However, each performs its distinct functions toward the same goals and fall under the marketing umbrella.

Advertising and branding are both critical elements of your company’s marketing process, working in unison to establish, enhance, and build equity to your company’s reputation and increase sales.

First Up: Marketing
Marketing is a process that involves all the strategies, tactics, and activities your company utilizes to build awareness and facilitate the sales of its products and services. Marketing acts as an umbrella that encompasses brand, advertising. Marketing is anything that brings your products and services together with your consumers. This includes websites, social media interactions, printed materials, television and radio promotions, public interactions, and customer service.

To emphasize the importance of marketing as it encompasses branding and advertising, let’s look at Tried and Tasted: The Ultimate Shopping List, a BBC Channel four television show hosted by Chef Michel Roux Jr. In each episode, a small panel of food experts blind-taste test Britain’s favorite foods, ranging from meat and cheese to crackers to soda and beer, and then they declare taste-test winners. When stripped of their strategically branded packaging, often, the most expensive products do not win. Do you think Pringles would win in a blind-taste test against every chip on the market?

The blind-taste testing on Tried and Tested is the ultimate testimony to the dazzling sophistication and psychological impact that the marketing of food brands has on our affinity, loyalty, and associations to some brands.

The best illustration of this, of course, is a recent update to the famous blind-taste test that compared Coke and Pepsi. In the blind taste test, people chose Pepsi over Coke. However, when showed the cans, those same people said they preferred Coke. This is what Barry Smith, Professor of Philosophy at London University, had to say in his updated study of the tests, “That’s because they prefer the Coca-Cola brand. There were neuroimaging versions of this test showing that we get pleasure from the brand, activating our pleasure centers. These can influence how we perceive taste and flavor.”

That’s a pretty good argument for the Kellogg’s famous 2.7 billion dollar purchase of the Pringles brand—a chip that will probably never win a taste test—and proof that marketing is everything.

Are you looking for a marketing team to get sales rolling? From marketing to branding to advertising, we are always interested in helping you grow!

First introduced in 1972, idc-marketing is the most helpful, most prominent, and oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.