While product marketing focuses on the specific characteristics of a particular product brand marketing deals with the firm and its products in general.  Because they serve different functions with little substitution between the two, firms will need both of them in the long run.  Even well-known brands such as Apple Inc. use product marketing to inform the public about their individual products as well as engage in brand marketing to develop/sustain their brands.

Brand Marketing is all about spreading the Love about the Brand to consumers it is about focusing on intangible attributes. Product marketing essentially focuses on the product tangible attributes.

 Product Marketing is strategic marketing at the product or product line level and is for developing positioning, messaging, competitive differentiation, and enabling the Sales and Marketing teams to achieve marketing objectives. brand marketing is focusing more on company's brand to increase their market identity.

Dear All,

Product Marketing creates tangible value differentiation whereas Brand Marketing creates emotional value differentiation. And Brand Marketers always tries to deep seat those emotional value differentiation in the minds of the customers. So that the customers will consider those emotional value over and above the products tangible value, but companies are doing both.

Regards,

Ajai Krishnan G

thanks Ajai, some companies which use direct market do not apply brand marketing at all especially in some developing countries. 

Dear Friends,

I think it is an open forum and have noticed that someone had negatively rated (Downvoted) my point of view, instead of simply rating the view point negatively at least show some courage to come to the limelight and speak or write about your point of view about the subject. Then we will have a fruitful discussion on that, so that everyone will get benefited out of that. Thank You.................

Product marketing is about new product development, product attributes decisions, place of a specific product in a range of products…

Brand marketing consists in managing and leveraging brand equity. Brands are now extended and a given brand can be used for several categories of products. One of the roles of brand marketing is to pay attention on the fact that the marketing of products is coherent with the brand identity and does not dilute the brand equity.

Brand may represent a portfolio of products, services, ideas or commodities. Its a more wide term than a product. Product marketing is based on the unique characteristic of that particular product over the closest competitor, in the same product category.

Product Marketing will be about the product focussing on its tangibility and its tangible attributes, however brand marketing will involve the intangible thing being created for product over time, its personality, attitude etc. So, brands always have better advantage over product. 

The answer by Philip Kotler in this short video ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bilOOPuAvTY

Hai Izzudin, thanks for the video and I have seen this before also. Our great Marketing Guru Kotler talks about three things that are Product Management, Brand Management and Customer Management. Also tells about the difference of each. In that he quoted examples of scientists, what they are doing in the lab? First of all have an idea about all the existing similar lines of products in the market and coming with a different product mainly tangible difference. Then communicating the features of the product to the outside world, there comes the Brand Management. That is even if you came with an excellent product having tangible differentiation, but you need to communicate that to the public in such a way that it needs to touch their emotions, so you need to communicate to them emotionally. So in the case of Brand Management you need to maintain an emotional relationship with the customers. Then you need to deliver that to the customers also. So customers will be influenced by those emotional values over and above the tangible value of the product. But direct marketing companies are focusing only on product management (whatever they produce, they tries to sell that) and not concentrating much on Brand Management. Earlier also I said the same thing.

Hello,

"Marketing" is a set of techniques (4 Ps)  that can be applied to many different objects. You ask the difference between 2 objects that can be marketed: the product and the brand.

The product is the tangible object made by the company while the brand is the intangible set of associations associated with the prodcut. See the origin of the word brand: it comes from a Germanic word that also means to burn: to mark with an iron, the brand is the mark that helps make the difference between two objects, and that difference enventually adds value to the plain product (brand equity).

As most products have brands, it can become tricky to make the difference in practice, I woud say it exists in terms of level of analysis (what you focus on): is the priority the tangible material or the intangible associations? 

Hope that helps

In my opinion the product or brand marketing needs to be viewed from the processes inherent in each where these are an attempt to create value for the customers. There will be overlaps in the processes and strategies, but the inputs in the strategy will be different. For example in product marketing the value proposition is located in the tangibles, as characterized by the product attributes and the value is in its use. On the other hand brand marketing inputs are more intangiblized value propositions which includes value in ownership. Therefore in both the cases there will be necessary differences and both will be required but in the long run when the marketing shifts towards the logic of value co-creation the brand logic will dominate.

Products perform a function and fulfill a felt need.Any product is a complex cluster of value satisfactions which are multidimensional in nature i.e it includes functional as well as deterministic attributes that customers aspire. Thus it may include a brand when product marketing focusing on STP and other principles evolve. Brand is primarily an emotion :  A TRUST. Brand is a promise of delivering the customer expectation. It is an emotion which can be subjective whereas a product is a blend of objective and subjective characteristics. Product comes first and then the brand. But brands can have longer lifecycles as compared to products as already enunciated in the product hierarchy viz. product form, product class, product type. To sum there is an intersection of product marketing and brand marketing. But brand image is more sustainable as the connect with the heart and the mind.

From a different perspective, I will illustrate brand marketing as the umbrella company with different products that needs marketing as well. eg CocaCola as a brand with four other products (CocaCola, Zero, Life and Diet). Another example will be Unilever as a brand marketing other products like Dove, Knorr, Lynx.