There is a common day-in-day-out cause of distress for modern business executives: balancing their funds between multiple categories and the need to put their money and resources behind the launch of a single software solution.
When analyzing product marketing vs brand marketing, for simplicity’s sake, many in management see product awareness and reputation as one and the same. Unfortunately, this leads to confusion about how to market, resulting in lost opportunities and revenue.
This guide explains the various ways that marketing operations, along with the workflows and measurement models that must be applied, will allow business leaders to bring together these two major players in driving growth across their company.
Product Marketing vs Brand Marketing: Scope, Target Audience, and Timing
The majority of marketing advice is mainly based on a long-standing perception of the marketplace — that product and brand marketing are two separate disciplines with two very distinct functions.
While it is true that product marketing is about selling features (functionality), it is false and damaging to the modern software company to believe this dichotomy of discipline is accurate. The distinction lies instead in what is being sold, who the buyer is, and the pace of the team’s operations.
Product teams create clear alignment between their solutions and their targeted markets. They find specific customer groups, leverage proven use cases, and deliver tangible business results.
In contrast, brand teams deliver broad trust and authority for the parent company to a larger target audience. This enables them to create an impression of the company so that prospects will find it easier to have effective sales conversations in the future.
The most successful technology companies do not focus solely on one side of the equation. They provide product opportunities to today’s customers, while also providing brands an opportunity to engender trust and trustworthiness in the years to come to support sales conversations in the future.
Where to Draw the Line
For executives to effectively align product and brand marketing, they must establish a structure of responsibilities for each group. Overlap between product and brand roles is common; however, the lack of a clear delineation of responsibilities leads to confusion and duplication of efforts.
The product engine function contributes to the immediate commercial success of a tool or service. It typically works in shorter to medium-term phases compared to the longer phases of building a trustworthy brand. It also focuses on achieving success through increased demand, adoption, and conversion.
Research conducted by the Product Marketing Alliance provides substantial evidence of how extensive the internal role is for product marketing teams. In recent years, approximately 91% of product marketers managed product positioning and messaging, and 80.9% directed product launches.
Additionally, nearly 79% of product marketers currently carry revenue generation responsibilities and have an impact on an organization's ability to sell, as opposed to a few short years ago.
Product marketing teams also conduct customer research, competitive intelligence, and provide input into pricing strategies. Part of the responsibility for product marketers is the time-to-value, product feature adoption, and early retention of a new user accessing a software platform.
How the Brand Engine Works
The brand engine focuses on the long-term brand strategy of accumulating trust from the marketplace, developing a corporate facet, and creating visual assets that represent the company.
The objective of a brand is not necessarily to induce imminent action but to create an ongoing memory anchor with regard to a given customer.
Take the example of Lemonade, which reached the one million user mark and earned $94 million in revenue during its first six years of business. Due to its intense brand position, Lemonade was able to grow as rapidly as it did, in contrast to companies that relied solely on feature lists to gain market traction.
Branding creates the power of pricing that distinguishes a premium brand from a lower-cost option. This gives the business strategic protection to expand its offerings and sell new products or services to current customers.
Bringing Your Product and Brand Teams Together
When looking at product marketing vs brand marketing, if the marketing and product groups are working in separate silos without being in alignment on their go-to-market strategies, it is common for there to be many points of failure between them.
For example, a brand team may approve a large television or print ad campaign that claims something that the product cannot deliver upon. At the same time, the product team may launch a technically impressive new product feature that completely ignores the company's brand values.
Connecting Brand to Product Value
A company's brand must be transferred to its product value proposition. Every piece of a product's messaging should carry the DNA of the parent company.
If the company's brand promises to be simple and easy to use, the product's value proposition should not read like an academic book with complex engineering terminology.
Typically, the brand team will define what a company stands for, while the product team translates that company identity into tangible business results.
Solutions marketing is the ideal method for bridging this divide. Solutions marketing combines multiple products into a package that addresses the needs of an executive buyer.
Solutions marketing incorporates the high-level vision that a brand expert creates, as well as the deep-seated technical validation that a product expert provides.
Fixing Launch Mistakes
Operational failures result from teams rushing to market with incomplete training. The typical operational failure is to have a product engineering team announce that a product feature is finished and ready to go to market just two weeks before the intended launch date.
This leaves no time for sales to develop and deliver a proper enablement package to the sales team.
If sales representatives rely on their previous decks to pitch, and if, on some occasions, those were very popular in their early days of implementation but ultimately resulted in limited adoption rates further down the line, then it should be assumed that these trends will also continue.
One way that the best-performing teams in the industry proactively mitigate this risk is by creating and using one template document to drive all major market launch activity.
Whether created in Notion or sent out via channels inside Slack, it’s imperative that a single document tracks the launch of a new product. It must contain all pertinent launch information, such as the brand promise, the exact customer value of the new offer, and the ideal customer persona.
It should also include the core proof points representing the product versus competitors, the most common competitive objections, potential ways to address these, and the key performance indicators for measuring success.
How to Measure Success
A modern three-tiered measurement approach for determining the reputation of a brand using long-term revenue generated by last-click models is impossible to do without using the appropriate tools available currently (e.g., using what many market leaders call structured systems for attribution).
Tracking Early Brand Signals
Prior to actual revenue generation, the market is providing decisive signals regarding the overall performance of a company’s brand.
Potentially the strongest indicators of a brand's ongoing growth trajectory are its brand visibility and consideration levels in the search engine environment, along with how many customers are looking for it.
In addition to these factors, launching a new product involves both the ability of your audience to understand the messaging you created to promote this product, and the amount of confidence a member of the sales force has in their ability to communicate this message when they face potential customers.
If the sales representative is unable to convey the benefits of the product during their communications to potential customers, and if potential customers are unable to express their appreciation for the product, there is a real possibility that your brand will suffer.
Tracking Engagement and Commitment
This second area of measurement will produce four main engagement indicators of interest to both teams: indications of user engagement through sales-force interactions (via sales reps collecting leads through the use of the platform) and the user's initial commitment to proceed from interest to trial.
Sales and marketing are both responsible for moving users along this pathway; however, they measure this based on very different metrics.
In addition to providing more insight into how user engagement is progressing as a direct result of sales-force activity, both teams will continue to monitor the degree of engagement through website traffic from users coming from targeted accounts.
They will also measure the speed of the sales process for those leads during the same time period.
Long-Term Sales Results
By the close of each quarter, a company must have created a balance sheet that matches its business operations and creates long-term outcomes.
The product marketing department has the responsibility to manage their win rate, identify anything they lost a deal to or a reason a deal didn’t close, measure revenue retention, and prevent customer churn.
The brand marketing department has the responsibility to ensure their brand is the dominant brand within the category, generate the highest possible level of interest in their brand through branded search traffic, demonstrate a high price point tolerance, and be able to hire top-tier talent in an effective manner.
Product Marketing vs Brand Marketing: Where to Spend Your Growth Budget
When determining the balance of product marketing vs brand marketing, simply saying to a company to “do both” is not a sound strategy when budget restrictions exist.
The leadership team must identify the true constraints that are restricting the growth of the business and allocate budget to resolve that specific issue.
Finding the Block in Your Sales Funnel
It is useful to analyze the sales data. If your target buyers are either unaware of your company, or if they are aware but are not trusting enough to schedule a meeting with you, it means brand awareness is your most critical funnel constraint.
Simply investing money into creating a series of in-depth technical webinars will not overcome the issue of having an empty sales funnel.
If your market is aware of your business name, but your sales process continues to stop or stall after the initial software demo, your product marketing is not being executed correctly.
Your target buyers possess an understanding of who you are, but they are unclear about why they should be willing to change from their current purchasing habits to your product. Tools such as Gong and Chorus are useful for capturing conversations that take place during a sales call and analyzing them for bottlenecks.
Competitive advantages will continue to diminish due to new entrants coming into the marketplace without any differentiation from existing providers. For sales reps to compete effectively in the marketplace, they require all of the following:
Effective sales enablement tools and materials
Clear and concise value propositions
Comprehensive battle cards
Simply adding a 'new logo' will not remedy reps' issues with their competitors.
Company Stage and Market Position
The balance of products and brands evolves as a company transitions through different stages. For example, at the startup stage, a startup has a larger need for validating their product and developing clarity in their category.
In addition, they must demonstrate that they have a viable software solution that actually addresses a critical need within the marketplace.
For a mature enterprise company with many products (i.e., 15 products), product marketing often finds itself in a much different situation and has its own set of problems. Product marketing often suffers from having a disorganized product portfolio.
As a result, although each individual product may have its own effective message, the parent company does not have a clear unified message and identity. Branching into other areas for brand growth and organization around the product is critical at this stage.
Many customers (including those who buy from you) will also associate your company with the larger parent brand equity. As such, companies like Apple and Microsoft have created brand assets and attributes that create a strong value proposition for every new product they introduce into the marketplace.
Final Thoughts on Spending
Most successful brands and their product lines exist in complete harmony with each other, showing the true power of product marketing vs brand marketing.
Product marketing is focused on building immediate and direct brand value and loyalty so the customer signs a contract today, whereas brand marketing is focused on creating long-term emotional connections with their target audience so they remember to reach out first when they are ready to purchase next year.
If the leaders of an organization force their product and brand marketing teams to work closely together, they will consistently outperform competitors who maintain their two teams separately.
Common Questions About Product Marketing vs Brand Marketing
How do we connect awareness to product demand?
You cannot continue to rely solely on last-click attribution to evaluate initial awareness efforts. Most brand marketing campaigns do not lead to an immediate sale of software on the same day as a result of those campaigns.
A better approach is to review the correlation between your brand's related search volume for a given period (within a six-month period) against your trial for conversion-to-purchase rate.
Over time, the trust developed by a parent company will lead to increased quality of direct or organic traffic. This increased level of trust will lead to greater conversion rates on your product landing pages because potential customers will arrive at your product pages with a higher level of pre-existing trust, which makes it significantly easier for them to purchase your product.
What happens when new features launch too early?
When coding is shipped faster than it can be marketed, the overall go-to-market strategy will become disorganized. Sales reps may ignore new features because they do not feel confident enough to explain the new features during a live sales call.
From the customer's perspective, there may be an initial spike in clicks from the launch email, but long-term activation rates will be low. Low long-term activation rates result from the fact that the value associated with the new feature was never adequately articulated to the customer through an onboarding process.
Once all elements of the sales narrative, objection handling, and customer support documents have been created for the launch of a new feature, the launch must occur at that point.
Who handles the market data?
Marketing teams and product marketing are both responsible for market data; however, product marketing typically has the primary responsibility for executing the market research for product marketing.
According to a study done by the Product Marketing Alliance, product marketers manage approximately 70% of all marketing-related customer market research and competitive analysis.
However, data captured from customer interviews, lost deals, and churn surveys must also be transmitted to marketing for use in creating brand marketing campaigns.
If you do not share information from marketing with product marketing, brand marketing activities become less relevant due to the lack of continuing to reinforce the buyer's experience through ongoing education.