What role does brand play in product marketing

Brand plays a critical role in Product Marketing and vice versa. In broad strokes, campaigns are either Product or Brand-led, and if one is leading, to be effective the other must be supporting. If we’re launching a new app, our focus is sharing the value proposition and highlighting key features, but the campaign is delivered in our Brand’s voice and within the umbrella of our broader Brand promise. If we’re launching a campaign to drive greater awareness of our Brand within a category, we’ll put our story and message front and center, but we’ll use key RTBs of our Product to underscore relevance. In this way Product and Brand are never too far apart and we’re best positioned to win hearts and minds.

Brand is such an important part of product marketing. Developing a strong brand, voice, and tone for your product or company lends itself to everything you do from launching new features to tradeshows. Brand is all about how your company or product is perceived in the market - how it stacks up against competitors and how it informs what people believe to be true about the functionality of your product. Product marketing can be 100x more effective at an organization if brand is a focus - features/products lean on brand and vice versa - when the two work well in tandem it can really set organizations apart.

At Momentive, Brand and Product Marketing are closely aligned, and collaborate on many initiatives. Here are some examples:

• Brand<>Product messaging: For brand messaging, PMM will consult on things like the category, brand-level value propositions, and connecting the brand narrative to product messaging. For product messaging, the brand team (specifically content strategy) will consult on elements like short descriptions, headlines, etc. to make sure any documented customer-facing messaging reflects the brand voice/tone.
• Product naming: as part of any product/feature naming process, you need to ensure brand fit. For example, at Momentive, we use very descriptive names for our solutions, like "Ad Testing" and "Brand Tracking", so if product marketing were to suggest a new heavily branded product name like "Satisfacto Plus" (making this up), we'd quickly realize it doesn't fit with the brand & naming hierarchy already established.
• Product visuals: PMM and brand collaborate on how we design product imagery across marketing assets (web, email, collateral, etc). For example: do we abstract the product or show actual screenshots? Show it in a desktop/mobile frame? Bold color borders? etc. In this case, visual consistency is key to convey the brand look/feel with bottom-of-the-funnel product assets.
• Thought leadership: PMM gets heavily involved in thought leadership across channels, whether it's partnering with demand gen on events/webinars or content strategy on guides/resources. Ultimately, thought leadership at the top of the funnel exists to build credibility for the brand, so should be reinforcing brand messaging. As you move through the funnel, thought leadership starts to lean more product-focused, but brand voice/tone are still critical for a consistent brand experience.
• ALL content/collateral: PMM needs to consider brand guidelines for any content they own outright. This goes for collateral, one-pagers, pitch decks, etc. One thing we did at Momentive to streamline this was work with Brand to create templates in Google Slides for things like collateral, white papers, customer-facing decks, etc. So all we had to do was start with the branded template - no need for brand approval or custom design work for every asset!

A brand is not a logo. It is not a catchy tagline. It is not a color or font scheme. It is not the visual imagery. It is not the writing style guideline. It is the sum total of all the experiences an organization provides to its customers and prospects.

I have worked in organizations where the company's most prominent "brand surface area" is its educational content (even though it is not in the education business). I have also worked on product teams where the product is the users' most significant brand interaction point. Similarly, website, email communications, support experiences, events (both in-person and virtual), etc., are all opportunities to create positive brand impressions with the target audience. Since Product Marketers care about all of these for their products, they should also care about the overall brand impression left behind by these interactions.