Brand Marketing vs. Integrated Communications Explained

Differences Between Brand Marketing and Communications

Brand Marketing

Marketing is the process of shaping your identity and defining what makes your offering meaningfully different from competitors. It serves as a compass, directing not only what you say but what you do to deliver distinctive value to your key constituents in a compelling way.

Brand Communications

Brand communication is a combination of activities that influence customers’ opinions of a company, its products, and its services. It involves crafting specific messages and delivering them to priority internal and external audiences.

While it may seem that marketing is more important at the strategy phase and communications grows in importance during execution, the reality is more complex. In our world of broad-reaching, two-way interactions, the two are co-reliant siblings from beginning to end.

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)

IMC is a management concept designed to make all aspects of marketing communication—such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing—work together as a unified force. It is an approach to achieving marketing campaign objectives through the thoroughly coordinated use of different promotional methods.

Integrated Brand Communications (IBC)

• IBC is a holistic communications process strategy.
• It aligns strategy, finance, and marketing communications to optimize brand value.
• Its starting point is the business, not just marketing communications.
• Its central premise involves the integration of all communication activities associated with managing a company's most precious assets: its brands.

This process involves achieving a clear understanding of the brand as a financial asset and identifying the drivers of brand value so they can be influenced and controlled through an integrated communications effort.