It's all about the brand
Throughout my career, I've heard terms like "branding," "marketing," "communications," and "PR" bandied about as both distinctly separate endeavors as well as near-synonyms. Want something promoted? To many lay people, that's marketing. Designing a new logo? Oh, that's branding. Writing content for a website? Oh, that's communications. Need a sensitive issue managed? Oh, that's PR. ...Or some combination thereof.
Scholars and practitioners have yet to help advance understanding as well as one might expect, as they've assigned myriad definitions, roles, and conceptual hierarchies to these bodies of work. Some marketing books seem to reference brand work as ancillary in, say, the second half of Chapter 3. This, as exciting articles on "launching a great brand" poorly examine how the magnificent new creations will ultimately find success in the market through, well, marketing — the dynamics that work together to prompt voluntary exchanges.
So, what's the "right" way to think about these areas of work? I hold the minority view that these related disciplines — and, really, everything we do to achieve our organizational mission, whether that's making a profit or fulfilling a social purpose — are under the umbrella of brand management. Another term I like is brand "stewardship."
In "The Theory of the Brand," which is one of my favorites, the late Sidney J. Levy wrote, "...I want to repeat for emphasis, it is the thesis of this discussion that branding comes prior to marketing. Branding is, in reality, the process of creating and offering the character and the reputation required by all individuals, groups, and commercial organizations in order to gain the responses they need to express and implement their purposes, motives, values, and goals. To accomplish these goals, the branders — all of us — engage in the exchange activities we call marketing, making it a function of branding rather than the reverse."
Levy's hierarchy, or "order of operations," is spot-on. I go just a bit farther: When we create a new program offering, plan how to segment our audiences, buy advertising, earn coverage in the news media, run a market study, open a new location, handle a crisis, set price points, host an event, secure investment, make a sale, post on a social media channel, evolve our identity marks, design a new web experience, measure our impact, share stories with donors and advocates, or, every day, express and live our values through word and deed, it is in service to — and a function of — the brand.
It. Is. All. About. The. Brand.