For a while I have understood that I am right at the center of brand & products—where many marketing professionals don’t get to play a lot—and I am grateful for that yet it is also the most confusing place to be. Yeah yeah, I’m living the life, I get to build digital and physical products as well as meaningful brands but it also means that while a number of objectives overlap perfectly, an equal if not even greater number of misalignments occur.
Here’s a brief intro: a brand strategist often sees things from functional and emotional value points, looking for sweet spots where the brand can exist perfectly in the life of the user; a product strategist sees things from an experience POV—looking at everything from the lens of if’s, how’s, then’s, why’s, yes’s and no’s. Much like algorithm.
You’re probably thinking what is this lad on about?
Many product people are like machines, often looking for what works best (albeit it may be short term, because to be honest we’re fighting fires a lot) meanwhile brand people are like doctors, looking for what does the most work in the shortest time for the longest impact. So it’s why branding a product, building the product and marketing the product are usually 3 different things.
To illustrate, we will use a popular pseudo business for this: a crypto business, and we will explore its branding, product-ing and marketing.
PRODUCT-ING
Now why did I start with this first? Products are built to solve a need, to plug a hole in the market, to first make life easier and then monetise that solution. As for me, being one who was fortunate enough to have built a product with a founder team, I can tell you for free that branding & marketing are after thoughts because what many are interested in is how the product works, if it works well and whether the solution we think the product was built for is scalable.
So product-ing, and essentially product strategy will be geared on finding the secret sauce (which is usually in the solution provided) that can help the business position properly.
However it’s often not enough as the business and team grows bigger, so this is where branding comes in.
BRANDING
At this point you’ve probably found what works for the product and you’re looking to scale, even though the product’s selling point may change often (as is the nature of startups, and crypto), it doesn’t change the fact that the foot in the door you need is your desired perception in the market. This is the part where the brand strategist takes that surface level description of the solution you’ve built, finds a deeper meaning to it and tells you how to sell yourself (and the products/services you offer) to your stakeholders and the market at large, as that *deep* thing.
For instance, FTX says it’s “built for traders, by traders” even though we all know their primary use is to buy and sell digital assets—as it is for a lot of products in web3 currently. That deeper meaning here takes them away from any product or service they build now or in the nearest future and sets the focus on them as an intentional business, one that cares about traders and will build products to serve them better.
You create your deeper meaning by asking a pretty popular question that I’m sure rings a bell: “what’s your brand’s purpose?”
So now that the deeper meaning has been found, how do you sell it?
MARKETING
This, as many people overestimate and underestimate it, is where you sell the business. The beauty of marketing is that you can tell almost any story, in any way, on any platform, with any initiative, with any means, for however long, and you may almost never go wrong as far as you consistently tell the same message.
Marketing for products, as many may not know often occurs in three ways:
Brand marketing: where you sell your brand, its deeper meaning and aim to build a sentimental connection with the market while making yourself top of mind, more than your competition.
Product marketing: here, you sell the features your product has; the problems it solves and what use cases they apply to. Product (or growth) marketing is usually heavily focused on number of users, volume (of user activity, transactions, time spent with the product, etc) and revenue. You can read more here.
Brand-Product marketing: I’m guessing you already know this means doing both of the above simultaneously. It’s tough, hardly ever linear and is complicated but if you love rollercoasters then it’s the place for you.
Being able to do all of this for products and brands is what I love most about my job but it’s also crazy trying to compartmentalise them at different stages of the brand and product, especially when like I mentioned earlier in this piece they overlap rarely and misalign often.
All of this, as you have read is the strategist’s dilemma. My dilemma.
I hope you understood me.