Brand Marketing – The Squishy Stuff

When you ask about Marketing to someone who you just met, this is what most people think what it means.

This is one a series of posts trying to explain marketing jargon to my engineer friends. I will explain as many terms as possible without the marketing jargon so its easy to understand.

Brand marketing is the practice of building and maintaining the perception of your company in the minds of your audience. It’s not about immediate clicks or conversions — it’s about making sure that when someone eventually needs your product, your name is the first one they think of. Brand marketing operates on a much longer time horizon than performance marketing.

It is by far the most visible form of marketing, that is by design. Your first perception of the product lives and dies here.

Brand encompasses:

• Visual identity: Logo, colors, typography, design system (yes, this is what the design team argues about)
• Voice and tone: How the company sounds in writing — formal or casual, serious or playful, confident or humble
• Positioning: What makes you different from competitors in the mind of the customer
• Values and narrative: What your company stands for and the story it tells
• Emotional associations: What people feel when they interact with you

Why Brand Is Hard to Measure

Brand marketing doesn’t have a clean attribution model. You can’t draw a straight line from a brand campaign to a sale. When someone buys a MacBook, what motivated them to buy it? This is called the dark funnel the invisible sequence of brand touchpoints that influence a purchase decision but can’t be individually tracked.

Brand marketers use proxies to measure brand health:

• Brand awareness: “Have you heard of [company]?” (survey-based)
• Brand recall: “Name a company that does X” — are you top of mind?
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely are customers to recommend you?
• Share of voice: What % of online conversations in your category mention you vs. competitors?
• Direct traffic and branded search: People typing your name directly into Google is a signal of brand strength.

Brand vs. Performance: The Classic Marketing Tension

In most companies, there’s a constant tension between brand (long-term, hard to measure) and performance (short-term, measurable). CFOs love performance marketing because it has clear ROI. Brand marketers argue that without brand investment, performance marketing gets more expensive over time because no one knows who you are, so your ads, performance efforts have to work harder.

[All opinions expressed are my own and have no relation with my employers – past or present. I use Huffl.AI to structure my thoughts. ]