Many branding experts routinely advocate using the tools of marketing to assist them with the branding strategy. It is often a research of customers' perceptions of a brand or investigation of the customers needs and wants. In short, it is called a "customer research." Why would anyone research the customer instead of using a more analytical method to identify brand values? As a result of all this confusion, many brand and product managers misuse “brand repositioning” when the correct and precise term would be “product repositioning”.

In the world of branding, a brand is what results from marketing consistency, this is achieved by:

Fulfilling Customer Expectations!

The customer who is present in the branding process, is the customer that is present in the mind of a company management so that management's vision of the brand's values should incorporate all they know and feel about their customer. On the other hand, the customer comes to expect that the brand will continue to display the same feel and characteristics, and this expectation creates a bond between the brand and the customer. The source of that consistency is often referred to loosely as the brand's values. The only way a brand can be truly consistent is by being true to instill and remind customers constantly with continual marketing communications.

To justify these two business tools, we can generalize that marketing is an extrovert and branding is an introvert. But why?

Simply because marketing communicates much more quickly and direct while branding is slower and has various channels to go through before execution.

Marketing communication is an essential aspect of marketing:

Because communication is expensive, a skilled marketer will conceptualize a campaign that has the ability to trigger a quick response and optimize the need of market awareness. All of which supports the idea that marketing is supposed to work fast.

Branding, on the contrary, is a slow process. That's because communicating what a brand is about is tedious and specific to communicating a person's character: it cannot be done proactively.

Branding is complex by design:

A rich and successful brand, are unified elements made of multiple concepts, associations and character traits. This takes time because values and associations that form the character of a strong brand are never one-dimensional. Communicating the character of a brand takes time to win over the customers trust.

Branding and marketing are closely related business tools, so closely related that they often cause confusion. Clear objectives and intent will set the pace for either one of these business tools function. Business strategist should be well advised to keep the two concepts well separated.