Brand v. Product Marketing

The difference between product marketing and brand marketing is that product marketing is about a physical thing and brand marketing is about ideas. Publishers rely on both, and I wouldn’t say that they are equally effective, but are two separate, necessary things. Publishers typically focus on the physical book object as a means to market their product, but if they have the ability to create a brand, either around their press or the book, they should do so. They are missing a critical aspect of marketing—unless of course the book appears on Oprah or The Daily Show.

My book marketing project for last term was to create a brand around my book by mock-marketing a fake book about my life as a barista and all of the sexy, intriguing, scary, and funny aspects of the job. The book was not to have big print run, so the publisher’s hope was to make sure that the audience knew that this title was legit, and did so by creating a brand around it.

The strategy was to use social networking on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter to sell the author as the right person to write this book. The brand I created was that the author is a funny person with a big personality that someone would want to spend 240 pages with. By giving the author a favorite coffee drink, pictures of her doing the barista thing, and coffee oriented readings and events, the author became a real person with knowledge of the industry.

Likewise, getting a book a slot on a major TV show also pegs the author as an expert since the audience sees them explain the book’s content.

The marketing of the physical product is more straight forward for publishers. Every aspect of editing through design lend to the marketing of the book. The type of paper markets the book, the binding, the size, the cover, the back cover copy. This is what publishers know how to do. They are grounded in the physicality of the object, and they’re all more or less good at it. This aspect of marketing is still very important because it is what the consumer can feel and pick up. Branding is beyond physical, and could be just that tipping point in this slow economy that a publisher needs.