In 2018, after two short years and $3 million raised in startup funds, recruitment AI company Ansaro shut down due to bad market fit. As it turned out, their AI interview notetaker didn’t address a huge pain point.
Muun found a market need but failed to compete with bigger names that provided customers with authoritative content and resources. Muun’s more well-known competitors had more features and better pricing.
Both companies suffered from a fatal lack of marketing. One neglected its positioning by failing to target the biggest pain point, and the other failed to build a brand that its customers could trust above the other major players.
To succeed in today’s crowded market, you need to harmonize product marketing and brand marketing.
In this article, you’ll learn the difference between brand marketing and product marketing, and how to balance both to stand out above the crowd.
Brand vs product marketing: Friends or foe?
Both brand marketing and product marketing are important to a well-built marketing strategy. They rely on each other for success.
Product marketing informs strategic positioning and ensures alignment across the company. It partners with sales to close more revenue, informs product teams to deliver better products, and in some cases, co-owns demand generation activities with marketing teams.
Product marketing is responsible for tasks like:
- Developing and executing go-to-market (GTM) strategies;
- Researching and understanding target segments;
- Analyzing competitor activities;
- Developing product value propositions;
- Defining messaging strategies;
- Ensuring customer success teams and salespeople understand the product features.
Product marketing uncovers where to play and how to win. And then it ensures that all of the organization’s efforts match that true north.
Brand marketing provides a strategic approach to building relationships between your brand and your customers. It uses the insights gained in product marketing to work out how to reach them.
The goal of brand marketing is to make your brand the first and most obvious choice when they’re looking to buy.
Brand marketing is concerned with objectives such as:
Brand marketing is about building connections through emotion and experiences, a key driver in consumer decision-making. Peter Noel Murray, Ph.D., reports:
“Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows that when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences), rather than information (brand attributes, features, and facts).”
When consumers make purchasing decisions, the choice is more driven by how they feel about your brand than what they know about your product.
Take Bellroy, a leather accessories retailer.
Their predominantly male audience has a problem: fitting a full wallet into their back pocket.
Bellroy has designed a range of slimline wallets to solve this challenge. They use product marketing techniques to target and educate their customers.
Using an interactive slider, Bellroy calls out the competition. They demonstrate how much slimmer their wallets are compared to a competitor, tackling both what it does and why it’s the superior choice.
Bellroy follows this with a brief…
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