Brand vs brand

the most confusing word in marketing & the 80/20 rule

We need to invest in the brand. You’ll often hear this in marketing. But what does *brand* mean? How do you define it? Is it ‘fluffy’, or is it tied to business metrics?

The term "brand" often leads to confusion, especially in B2B contexts. This confusion usually stems from the conflation of "Brand" (with a capital B) and "brand" (with a lowercase b), which, despite sounding similar, represent distinct concepts within the business landscape.

Brand - purpose/vision

The biggest mistake we see B2B Companies make: 

Investing in brand campaigns when they need a stronger Brand

Not investing anything in brand marketing & not building future customers

Over-investing in brand marketing relative to revenue/size of the company & not driving enough QoQ revenue. 

The Big "B" Brand

Brand with a capital "B" encompasses the holistic view of a company's brand. It's about more than just marketing; it includes every interaction and perception that shapes how customers and the public feel about a company. This includes:

• Mission, Purpose, BHAG (big hairy audacious goal)

• Customer Perceptions and Trust: How customers see and believe in your company.

• Emotional Connection: The feelings customers develop through their experiences with your brand.

• Company Interactions: Every touchpoint a customer or potential customer has with your business, whether through customer service, product quality, or online engagement.

The Big B "Brand" is an organization-wide ethos. It's not solely in the hands of the marketing team; it's influenced by everyone in the company, from the CEO to frontline employees.

The Small "b" brand

Conversely, a brand with a lowercase "b" refers to the marketing elements designed to influence and attract customers. These elements include:

• Creative / Visual Identity 

• Brand Campaigns: Targeted efforts to promote specific aspects of the brand.

• Visual Identity: Logos, color schemes, and general aesthetic guidelines.

• Web Design and Online Presence: How the brand presents itself digitally.

• Content and Social Media: The voice and substance of what is shared online.

• Video and Experiential Marketing: Engaging visual content and live interactions that enhance the brand experience.

The small b "brand" focuses on tactical, marketing-driven initiatives directly impacting how prospects and customers view the company.

The Intersection and Divergence

The differentiation between Brand and brand is crucial yet often overlooked, leading to the term "brand" being overused and misunderstood. Recognizing the distinction helps clarify strategies and roles within a business, ensuring that both Big B and Small B are effectively aligned to support the overarching business goals.

The two tweets above capture the difference between Brand and brand quite literally.

Small b Brand.

Jason is talking about brand - getting the word out, getting in front of potential customers, building affinity, and generating revenue. Brand (with small b) focuses on Faisal Siddiqui from a Creative Business Company called - Building Future Customers. Small b brand is all about getting mindshare and staying top of mind for prospective customers. This follows the 95/5 rule. 95% of your market is not in an active buying cycle right now. They are not feeling the severe pain that makes them go & look for solutions. They might be happy with the status quo, have built a workaround, or not have realized there was a better way. They will not buy your solution today, but they might in 3-6-12 months when external circumstances change and they come ‘in-market’.  Leverage brand campaigns to stay top of mind and build brand awareness & affinity towards your brand. The goal is not to have them ‘know you exist’ but tie to a specific use case/problem or buying opportunity (category entry point) 

Let's explore this from the P.O.V. of a crowded category like Project Management tools. 

This is what the PM tool market looks like:

Hundreds of PM tools are on the market, from bug trackers to MSFT Project to ClickUp / Asana Notion Basecamp Wrike Smartsheet, and dozens you have never heard of before.

So, how do you stand out in such a crowded category? You leverage brand.
When I said project management tools, you likely had one or four come to mind. What are those? Why were those?

For me, it's Clickup, Monday BaseCamp, and Trello. I am aware of others, but those have built up mental availability in my head and are tied to a specific buying context, aka mental availability.

Let's explore this further.

BaseCamp does not invest in traditional advertising, but the founders of BaseCamp / 37signals are prolific on Twitter and have extreme and polarizing opinions. They don’t need to invest in a 30-second brand spot - they are the brand. Their strong opinion on how software should be built and how work should be done also attracts people who believe in the same ethos - strengthening the Brand. Because I follow them on Twitter and read their P.O.V. quite often, and they talk about BaseCamp quite alot - I’ve come to associate them with project management tools. I am actively considering buying Basecamp next time we decide to roll out a project management tool.

Monday and Clickup are the opposite - they invest heavily in marketing and advertising. In fact, according to Monday’s S1 filing - they invest 90%+ in Sales and Marketing. Everyone remembers the point when Monday was everywhere you went. Youtube, OOH, Podcasts, Search, Social - everywhere. They constantly hammered the message of Monday being a project management tool. Similar was Clickup, which famously went with the All-in-One and Save One Day a Week message.

These products have developed mental availability by being prolific and staying in front of prospects. Everyone knows they are project management tools, and they will think of these when they think, ‘I need a project management tool.’ Research shows buyers often have 2-4 products already short-listed when they go to make a purchase.

An unrelated example is HotJar vs MS Clarity. Ask anyone which tool they recommend for heatmaps and recordings of user behavior - 99% of the time you will hear HotJar. Even though MS Clarity is free, it is arguably better in some ways. Hotjar has spent years talking about the product and the category that the 2 have become synonymous. MS Clarity on the other hand is a minor product within the MSFT umbrella - they probably have 1 engineer assigned to it (I am just making a point) and they don't even talk about it.

So how do you build mental availability and brand exactly? Not by spending 90% of your revenue on advertising. Very few companies can even afford to do that. But one mistake I see B2B marketers make when talking about brands is confusing the brand playbook of a $1B company with a sub $100M one. As a smaller company brand is built via content. A great example is this article you are reading. This is our agency branding.

Content doesn't have to mean ‘blog’; it can be Video, Audio, Written, Social, and distributed via social media and advertising. You can also layer in events, OOH, and other channels.

Brand (campaigns) are not a channel - they are a way of distributing a core message to a core audience via different means. 

• Events: Intercom World Tour, Profitwell Van

• Digital Advertising: Grammarly Youtube Ads

• Social: Fast was famous for its social. A current example of TripleWhale

• OOH: Segment, StatSig, Intercom

• Podcast: There are countless of them now, but podcasts tend to be more intimate. An excellent example of podcasts by VC firms

• Video Naturally leads to more storytelling because of the medium. Popular brand campaigns have been brand videos ( Zapier, Deel or Upwork)

• TV: Gong famously ran a localized ad during SuperBowl. Salesforce did what Salesforce does.

• Analyst Relations 

• Press Mentions & Press Relations

Note: Agencies and marketing services providers are a commoditized market, which is why brand (marketing) has become more critical, which is why we focused on brand (distinct visual identity, content and social from day 1).

Check out Standout Startup Brands for more on how tech companies approach brand marketing.

BRAND

Regarding things like Brand, we typically mean company values, positioning, messaging, and the intangibles of their product, support, service, sales, etc. These things are more complicated to cultivate and define actively but are shaped organically by each person's interaction with the company or product.

Obsessed by Emily Heyward is a book that helped me understand this. Emily co-founded Red Antler, the brand agency behind Casper, AllBirds, Chime, and Brandless. The idea of Brand is the company's identity that shapes its corporate strategy, GTM, hiring, team, organizational design, and every other decision.

When I talk about brand, what I’m actually talking about is what a business stands for, at its very core. - Emily Heyward

This is very distinct from the idea of Brand & brand marketing - the purpose of a business & its reason for existence is more than just ‘let get more mental availability’.

Linear or BaseCamp, or Intercom are great examples of this. Every choice the company makes, from its product (opinionated products about issue tracking, project management, or customer service) to its design choices on the website to product & how they communicate with the outside world, is driven by Brand.

To build a winning brand today, you must start with your customers and the problem you are solving for them. The brands that people love most are embedded within the business idea itself - Emily Heyward (Obsessed)

Brand and brand have become meaningless in conversations because we keep using them interchangeably. It does not help that when someone talks about brand, we start waving our hands around and talking about vibes, feelings, and ‘what customers say about us when we’re not in the room’ - a company can’t take vibes and make payroll with them, a marketing team can’t take vibes and shape them into a meaningful business outcome, and sales can’t sell vibes. When discussing the brand, our first instinct is to compare a 10M company with a 1B company or a B2B company with a B2C company like Nike.

B2C & B2B are fundamentally different, though. How I buy running shoes (lifestyle, aspirational, low risk) is very different than how business software is purchased (risk mitigation, multiple parameters, price, functionality). Brand or branding has room in B2B marketing. If in B2C we can differentiate 100% on brand (most DTC products are likely manufactured in the same factory in China, Vietnam or Bangladesh) in B2B brand, 10-20 % of the decision matrix. Credit to Ali Mansoor for shaping this idea.

How customers and prospects feel about the company is important. This isn’t to say ignore the brand, but not at the expense of the product.

If you look at *martech* aka marketing/sales tech companies like Drift, Clari, or any of the 11,000 vendors (yes, there are that many) you’ll notice a lot of them differentiate via ‘marketing/brand’ (small case b) but often this at the expense of actual product innovation. I call them ‘marketing first companies’ - their product might be mediocre or sometimes inferior but because they’re selling to marketers, they can create a halo effect around their product with good branding/marketing. Once you *actually* use the product, it's underwhelming & years behind the promises the marketing & sales make.

Compare that with Stripe and Shopify Intercom Notion - they are product-first companies. They think of the product first & the product itself creates a halo effect around the brand. Stripe is a payments company - probably the most boring industry in the world - it's a ‘backend’ tool’ that makes it easier for developers to collect, process & route payments. But they have an incredible Brand & branding (they also publish books under Stripe Press). Intercom was arguably the early pioneer in publishing great content & the new series is an excellent reminder of brand marketing that made Intercom an inspiration for so many. Shopify has both an inspirational message (Brand) & great branding. But what these companies have in common is they invest heavily in product & engineering, which is fundamental to their brand. They are not gimmicky or trying to ‘create new categories’ - they have strong product/engineering cultures that are the primary drivers of the org. The product is focused on solving a specific challenge for a specific set of people. Shopify wants to democratize commerce for everyone. Intercom wants to be the leader in customer support - this extreme focus on solving the core problem (and as you grow tangential problems around it) creates happy customers who cant help but talk about the thing.

Echoing Dave Kellog - “if you want to build a brand, go sell some software

Or, as Janessa said in the comments, “If you want to build a brand, solve hard and valuable problems for your customers."

When we say Brand, we can mean many different things, and each person uses it differently. Marketers don’t do themselves a favor either by calling one thing 10 other names. We say storytelling, narrative, strategic narrative, story, positioning, messaging, etc., but what we usually mean is the company's Brand.

Maybe it's time to go back to basics & focus on the company “Brand” when we mean the values, mission, why & brand campaigns when we mean ‘we want to build mental availability with potential customers.’ A company can't be successful without a Brand: positioning/messaging market segment on which they are focused. It is a beacon to potential customers & focuses the company's roadmap, marketing, sales, product, and engineering on solving a specific set of problems in a particular set of customers. Brand marketing, though, must start in the later stages of maturity. In the early days, the founder is doing brand marketing by talking to customers, talking about the vision & evangelizing the problem. As you mature & build a strong GTM motion - brand campaigns become essential to reach future customers. As you scale - brand campaigns become about defending your territory & business & reminding customers & prospects you exist.

BRAND, particularly positioning & messaging, is critical for the company's success. It's how you know what to build, for whom, the problems it solves, and how to find your ideal customer. It uses the customer's language to identify the problem/solution. It's a compelling reason why a prospect should buy from you. If you want to improve the performance of your Demand Generation campaigns, focus here. Too often companies want to start demand generation but they are not clear on their customer, their position in the market, or how they describe what they sell & the demand generation campaigns as a result, don't generate any meaningful results.

Brand marketing is a question of how much and when. Not every dollar invested in marketing is / should be expected to make an immediate return. Brand marketing is about when to invest, how much & when. Call it top of the funnel, call it brand marketing - the idea is to focus on *reaching* the right audience at a consistent frequency across many different channels to be ubiquitous (and connecting the *problem* to your *solution*) so when the customer experiences a problem - they mentally connect you to the solution (i.e., category entry points). Brand marketing is present across multiple channels to surround as much of the market as possible.

Brand marketing without sales activation doesn’t work. Sales activation without brand marketing means constantly increasing you CAC with the next customer you want to acquire.

While there is no hard & fast rule -  if you are < 100M, our revenue stacking playbook recommends investing 20% in always-on-brand campaigns (that is not measured in leads, SQLs, or Pipeline directly) or 80% in direct response/sales activation (which is tied to leads, S.Q.O.s & pipeline)

But before you spend a dime on Demand / Brand Marketing, make sure your brand is buttoned up and clear.

Thank you to Janessa for the feedback & helping me develop some of these thoughts better. Sebastian for the editing & proof reading & Alejandra for the amazing illustrations.