Branding Vs. Marketing

Case Study

This Case study demonstrates the dangers of excessive marketing, without concerning about the brand.

Stage1: Company A represented one of the big chains for selling newspapers and magazines across the country.

Stage2: After a few years the revenue growth slowed and reached its peak therefore heads of the company decided to expand their line to sell additional products (stationeries), after execution of this plan all the financial analysis indicated that stationeries are selling well and more profitable than newspapers and magazines.

Stage3: The company’s decision makers thought to expand the lines further and sell chocolate, crisps and soft drinks as well. Again the financial analysis were convincing that the company was heading toward making more profit, even they had defended this expansion with the following logic (when customer has purchased a newspaper at £1.00, and picked up a chocolate bar at £0.50 while waiting in the till queue this means the sales has increased by 50%, and imagine multiplying these figures to the number of branches and customers per year it would generate a big sum of revenue at the end of the financial year.)

Stage4: The company expanded the product line to offer sandwiches, Coffee and financial services.

Well done this may look like a success story, but it’s a disaster plan in terms of branding.
Gradually the number of unsatisfied customers increased, management of the stock became so diverse, and they have tried to increase the product range desperately to satisfy every customer that triggered a chain reaction and the company spiralled downward.

If you were an author what would you prefer?

• A: to write one book and sell 10,000 copies.
• B: to write 10 books and sell 1000 copies each.

If you owned a shirt store, how could you reduce your inventory costs and gain bargaining power on purchasing stock from suppliers?

• A: to have 10 shirts and sell 1000 of each
• B: to have 1000 shirts and sell 10 of each

Conclusion

In real world there is always an optimum point on the marketing and branding analysis. The curves indicate that stepping forward after the optimum point will create a fundamental trade-off between branding and marketing, this means there would be a point that further expansion sacrifices either branding or marketing.

Marketing can maintain a brand (Brand Maintenance) and the marketing budgets can be considered as the defence budget in terms of branding strategy. However marketing has short term effects almost like the ON and OFF switch, when a marketing plan is executed normally the results are expected within months or seldom a few years, but power brands can be so dominate that passes through generations.

To finalise this article, marketing and branding both use the same tools and both target the same goals.

Perhaps a strong brand can help the marketing to aim higher, and even for infant brands, strong marketing plans can create a great exposure. Marketing and branding can be deceivingly identical but they are completely different elements in any business success.