In This Post

Not all marketing is created equal: brand marketing builds an ecosystem and identity, while social media marketing pushes short-term campaigns. In this post, we unpack the key differences, when to use each, and why tone and cohesion matter more than ever.

“[Is the brand] selling a lifestyle, creating a whole ecosystem, or are they selling a specific product?” Kara Lattanzio, Senior Account Director at ASA, said while discussing the difference between brand marketing versus social media marketing. 

If you don’t know the difference, I’m right there with you. For this blog, I spoke with Kara and referred to marketing experts like Rachel Karten (with the fabulous Substack, Milkkarten) to clarify the key distinctions between marketing that focuses on building a strong brand identity, and marketing that primarily invests in social campaigns. Understanding the difference between brand marketing vs social media marketing is what helps you decide when to invest in long-term brand building and when to run a focused social media campaign.

Breaking down brand vs. social media marketing

Brand marketing, in my opinion, is easier to understand than social media marketing — so it’s a foundational place to start when you’re comparing brand marketing vs social media marketing. Broadly, iconic brands that have shaped our understanding of brand marketing today include Apple (“We’re a Mac household”), Nike (“Just Do It”) and Glossier (“the Glossier Girl”). Taylor Swift’s “Eras” is a masterclass in brand storytelling.

Brand marketing is increasingly common, in the age of digital marketing where everyone posits themself as a brand, feeding their prescribed lifestyle to the algorithm (and their audience). Brands don’t just sell products like lipgloss, they create aesthetic worlds where the lipgloss is a necessary key to entry. 

As such, while brand marketing traditionally involves “a focus on making the company name recognizable rather than emphasizing the founder,” as Kara said, individualistic influencer capital has created a marketplace where brand identity thrives when there’s a distinctive face to the name. 

This doesn’t guarantee success, necessarily, but when done correctly — with smart aesthetic branding, adherence to tone across copy (non-Chat GPT copy is important!) and a sense of world-building across social channels — it’s a powerful approach to brand marketing that can make an empire. Those aesthetic worlds are where a lot of modern marketing microtrends live — from faux dinner-date shows to mukbangs and other intimacy-first formats. Think: Hailey Bieber’s Rhode, Kim Kardashian’s Skims, Alex Cooper’s Unwell network.

Take Rhode for example. Hailey Bieber’s booming beauty brand is a prime example of founder-centric brand marketing in the digital age. Bieber leveraged her own strong personal branding to create a cinnamon-roll, donut-glazed, strawberry-flushed cheek world of clean girl beauty. According to Karten, key facets of brand marketing include adherence to brand copy and tone, strong, cohesive aesthetics and a dynamic and engaged social media team that is on the pulse of community conversations. A prime product example of effective brand marketing, a la Rhode, is their branded lipgloss-holder phone case, which affixes your Rhode-specific lipgloss to the back of your phone.

“I don’t usually like that sort of thing,” a friend of mine said recently. “But because it’s Rhode, it’s cool girl and I want it.”

If you’ve ever wondered what actually makes brand copy feel cohesive and human across channels, we broke that down in more detail in our piece on what makes copy good in an AI-saturated world.

So what’s social media marketing anyways? 

TLDR: social media marketing tends to sell a singular product through an effective social media campaign, rather than marketing the brand itself as a lifestyle and a world that people want to be a part of. An excellent example of this recently was Asic’s ad with Succession’s Brian Cox. For those who don’t know, Cox played TV’s baddest business Dad on the HBO hit show, a man who lived his life to work behind a desk. In the Asics ad, Cox is espousing the dangers of sitting behind a desk for your health, encouraging movement in comfy sneakers while walking away from his office chair in a pair of Asics. He uses the same imploring tone that he has in Succession — it’s an incredible ad. A quick Google search and scroll through their website later, and it’s clear that Asics is not building an aspirational world for their running shoe consumer: they’re just selling a product, effectively, on social media. 

There’s a key component to brand marketing that differentiates it from social media marketing, and the absence of it highlights why the Asics ad is an example of the latter. Karten refers to it as “The Glue.” The glue refers to the factors (tone, aesthetic, branding) that keep all of the elements of a brand’s identity cohesive, that make it a world the consumer feels like they can step into. The glue draws these elements together to create an ecosystem for the consumer to live in: a Rhode girl (it’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me) could be aptly pictured re-applying lipgloss from her phone case holder with a matcha in hand, wearing a baby pink hoodie, with perfectly clear, glazed skin. It’s what Hailey would want. When brands chase social campaigns without that glue in place, things can get messy fast — as we saw with recent food and beverage branding scandals.

In other words, social media marketing is usually more about short-term performance than long-term brand building — which is why it works best alongside, not instead of, brand marketing.

How brand marketing and social media marketing work together

In reality, most strong brands don’t choose between brand marketing vs social media marketing — they let each do what it’s best at. Brand marketing sets the foundation: the story, tone, visual identity and world you want people to step into. Social media marketing then taps into that foundation to run short-term campaigns that move specific products or messages.

When they’re working well together, your social campaigns feel like natural extensions of your brand, not random one-offs. The social content might be trendier or more experimental, but it still sounds and looks like you.

Should you invest in brand or social media marketing? 

When it comes to your own business, the idea of brand marketing may feel like a huge undertaking. You don’t have to tackle it in one fell swoop — you can build your brand identity one thoughtful step at a time. You might not even realize that it’s happening, but you are working towards creating a memorable brand — and that’s brand marketing! Or maybe you realize that all you need is to push one of your products more effectively with a smart, targeted campaign, in which case social media marketing is your best bet. 

Considering whether to focus on brand or social media marketing depends on your overall goals and vision for your business. We’re here to help. As a digital marketing agency in Toronto and creative agency working across brand, content and social, we help clients build a long-term brand foundation and then layer smart social media marketing on top. Reach out to chat about which mix makes sense for you.