Are you promoting your business or a brand?
It is a simple question with conflicting answers. Many believe that they both are the same. And when you’re marketing your business, you’re marketing your brand.
But the truth is something else. Your business is a company, a business entity with several elements such as product, services and marketing.
I stressed marketing because that’s where the definition of the brand comes in – it is the image and identity of your business.
“So, it is all in the logo, right?”
Not really. Even though the first impression a brand makes is through its visual appeal, it is not all there is. It is how you present yourself to the world and how you tell your story to the listeners:
And what emotions do you try to elicit from those who are listening?
Before we dive in and answer the true meaning behind building a brand vs building a business, let us first ask ourselves – why answering this question is important.
The importance of knowing the difference between brand and business
Your business is the way you serve the people, and your brand is your business is perceived by them.
“If I do the right thing and sell the right products, people will love me.” – an idealist adage that persisted for a long time.
Idealist entrepreneurs put their heart and soul inside their products, but they don’t always get the recognition they deserve.
Why?
Because they didn’t bother about the brand.
The “I let my work speak for itself” ideology might have worked in the past, but that was because the world was smaller. You could’ve started a shop anywhere in the middle of the road. And if you provided the products or services the people needed, they responded with their trust.
However, as time went on, people’s needs diversified – so much so that they didn’t know what they were looking for. And since there were many options for them, it became important for the product builder/service provider to do something that differentiated them from the rest.
That’s how Advertisement was born. Traders across the world realized that to bring people to the business, you need to bring the business’s symbol to the people.
That symbol is what we call today branding.
Nowadays, branding holds equal value as business. It is your trademark that leaves an impression on your customers. So why is it important to understand the difference between brand and business?
It is because that’s the only way to bring customers to the business.
Brand Building vs Building a business: What’s the difference?
Here are the differences between building a brand vs building a business.
Building a business
- Setting up the business entity, developing products and services and then creating the foundation for marketing: You materialize your business idea first by turning it into a legal entity. Then you move your attention towards creating offerings. While that’s happening, you lay the foundations for marketing your products.
- Focusing on the business’s internal systems and driving the sales: The goal of building a business is to add more wealth. It is to create strategies to drive more sales and develop the internal systems so that every component interacts properly.
- Development of products and services: It is the fine-tuning of products and services that work towards business development.
Building a brand:
- How the people see your business: The goal of branding is to create a positive image of your business.
- Evoking emotions from the customer: Branding strategies are about making customers feel for the business the brand represents. Because despite how good your product is, people won’t care about it if it doesn’t make them feel good.
- Experiences and building relationships: The focus of branding is fostering positive relationships with the customers and creating experiences powerful enough to compel these customers to show more interest in the business.
Business is about the technicalities of the enterprise, but the brand is about communicating those technicalities in a simple language
You can’t build a business without creating a brand. While a business works towards the technicalities of the product, it is the brand that communicates them to the customers.
The goal of branding is to remove the technicalities from the business it represents. It is to paint a picture of how the service or product will resolve customer’s issues. It targets specific pain points of the customers and tells them how a particular product or service can deal with them.
What is more important: Brand or Business?
There is no either-or when it comes to building a business or a brand. A brand’s goal is to feed the interested parties into the marketing funnel to turn them into leads and then customers. Business lies are the core of it all – it is as important as branding and can’t exist without it.