The functional differences between branding, advertising, marketing and public relations!

Many people have this question when they first start a company: What is the difference between branding, advertising, marketing and public relations? What do they have in common? Do I need one department to manage all of these things, or should I have separate departments for each?

Here are the opinions of 8 experts from the interview hotline on the differences and similarities between branding, advertising, public relations and marketing:

Rob Frankel, branding expert, author and speaker, founder of i-legions and PeerMailing.com, said: "Brand creation strategy, marketing is about how to plan to expand the brand. Advertising is about buying publicity opportunities to increase awareness, and PR relies on media relations."

"Brand is the overall goal of advertising, marketing and public relations," said Mark Scott, founder of Mark Scott Public Relations, advertising and marketing expert and experienced public relations professional. “A brand is about how consumers understand its products, its values, how to communicate with consumers, how to buy, etc.”

The focus of branding is to create an image of goods, services and consumer groups, and then make these factors work together with marketing, advertising and public relations. Zlata Farman, founder of Zlata Public Relations, believes that "the role of branding starts from here."

Charles Horowitz explained that the role of a brand is to shape the prospects of a consumer group or a company. She is the author of several award-winning books on marketing, including the recent Amazon bestseller Guerrilla Marketing : Winning Strategies to Increase Your Profits. “Not just through logos, slogans, colors, etc., but also through leveraging the recognition of the company. For example, customer service plays a very important role in branding.”

Linda Bowfield, CEO of Strategic PR, explains that branding is a means of establishing a "personality" for a business, product or service in the minds of consumers.

But brand strategy is also about defining a company's image, Frankel said. He suggests that when establishing a company's brand strategy, it is best to have an outside public relations firm do the work, as departments within the organization may be too focused on their own agenda or be overly influenced by corporate policies.

“Once a company has determined its brand strategy, it’s time to move on to advertising and PR, which is designed to increase awareness of the company,” Frankel continued. “Many companies make a critical mistake by allowing advertising and PR to create or build the brand strategy. In reality, advertising and PR techniques are used to increase publicity for the brand strategy—not to create the brand strategy.”

“Advertising is a simple visual manifestation of branding,” Farman said.

"The purpose of advertising is to promote a brand to a specific consumer group," said Gerald Corbett, president of the Public Relations Society of America.

Horowitz said that advertising is a means of allowing brand promotion to reach consumers directly by purchasing advertising space. “You have control over the content of the ads because you’re spending the money to advertise,” he explains.

Scott also agreed with this point: advertising is paid media.

Unlike paid advertising, public relations is an earned media exposure. One of the main functions of public relations is to promote brands through media communication to gain public attention and recognition, Scott continued.

Editor's note: We often hear the terms earned media, owned media, and paid media. Simply put, earned media is earned public reputation, owned media refers to a company's own websites or social media such as Weibo accounts, and paid media is paid TV ads or media advertising space. Companies should integrate these three channels and work together to play a greater role.

The following is a picture compiled from Forrester Blogs by @socialbeta, a well-known domestic social media website, which can clearly show the differences and benefits of these three "media types".

The goal of PR is to introduce a business and gain publicity and awareness, said Rob Frankel, chairman of the marketing team for the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA).

PR is creative and strategic communications designed to support the branding of a product, service or consumer group, Farman explains. "PR is mainly about media relations. The main goal is to promote your products to the media and then let consumers know about them through a large number of media channels."

PR is about influencing public perception of a company, product or service through direct advertising through traditional media or social media, Horowitz said.

Advertising is about what you offer, while marketing is about what your customers want, says Vicki Lackner, CEO of the Pain Stompers Foundation, founder of the Caregivers Club, and owner of Medical Bridges. “The difference is the focus.”

Marketing is a process and strategy about how to solve customer needs and deliver them through various channels, Corbett said.

The goal of the market is to raise public awareness and influence consumers to take action, Horowitz said. Markets may influence consumers to purchase goods, change purchase intentions, or change lifestyles.

Marketing includes the functions of public relations and advertising, Scott said, but marketing also includes other aspects such as events, sponsorships, trade shows, product promotions, search engine marketing or SEO, and so on.

If the brand is the goal, then the market is the strategy, Frankel said. Therefore, advertising and public relations are skills.

In short, marketing is the strategy, advertising and public relations are the techniques, and branding is the goal, Frankel said.

Similarities/Differences

“There are a lot of differences between advertising, marketing, branding and PR – but they often work together,” says Farman. For example, an advertising agency will work with a public relations agency to ensure that specific promotional activities proceed smoothly and interact with each other.

Scott said that these aspects have more and more similarities and are becoming increasingly closely connected. The best marketers, advertisers, PR people, and brand people understand this and work together to achieve the right balance of parts.

Horowitz agrees that there is increasing overlap between advertising, marketing, branding and PR. If these functions are not performed well, the company will be in trouble.

For example, many television shows require some form of sponsorship or audience giveaway so that a corporate spokesperson or brand name can appear on the show, Scott said. “It’s not just about having an interesting guest or a good brand pitch,” he said. “If you’re not a celebrity, a little girl who fell into a well or a gossip star, it’s getting harder and harder to get on these shows. Marketers who don’t understand that are missing out. When you have advertising, product marketing and PR working together to create the best opportunities, that’s when all the departments work together.”

In social media, advertising, marketing, branding and public relations have more intersections, Scott said. A marketing department might control the budget for creating a brand page on Facebook and offering product giveaways, but it’s often the PR people who engage in the real conversations with reporters and editors in media outlets or potential customers at trade shows. “If you miss the opportunity to get advertisers to share their ideas on social media, you can quickly lose supporters and reduce the value of the media channel.”

For example, corporate news wires like PR Newswire offer news distribution services that are primarily targeted at traditional media outlets, Scott said. “News released through these channels is now searchable online and automatically crawled by hundreds or even thousands of websites.” Not only must your press release convey important information to the media, it must also be seen as a branding tool because it will be seen by the public.

Scott also mentioned that press releases can improve a company's overall search engine marketing ( SEM )/search engine optimization ( SEO ). "A well-written, standard, SEO-friendly press release can increase a company's overall branding and marketing effectiveness."

Therefore, the functions of branding, advertising, public relations and marketing must be coordinated and used jointly to achieve the overall goals of the enterprise, Bowfill said. She recommends that all functions be directed by an overall “leader.”

“PR and advertising may be handled by different departments within a company, but both departments should report to the same boss so that all PR activities can be coordinated and consistent with the company’s desired brand perception or image,” she said.

She went on to say that there was no reason to differentiate between the functions, but that they required people with different skills to perform them.

However, Corbett disagreed, saying there was not much overlap between the departments. He believes all departments need to be on the same page about strategy and messaging: “Each part needs to be executed through different channels,” he said. The focus message and functions must be aligned, but whether each department should operate independently really depends on the size of an enterprise.

Which one dominates?

In terms of hierarchical institutions, PR is dominant and in charge of a company's publicity message, Corbett believes. He said that the advertising, branding and marketing departments need to cooperate with the public relations department in terms of the form and content of marketing publicity. PR defines the strategy and leads other departments to adopt appropriate approaches and processes to ensure that the messages communicated to the audience are consistent.

But Horowitz believes that these functions should all be part of the marketing department so that marketers can obtain multi-faceted information and have a coherent and comprehensive grasp of all details. “Advertising, branding and PR are all subsets of marketing,” he said. “Advertising and PR are also part of branding.”

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