Brand Marketing, Product Marketing

Marketing a product is different than marketing a brand. The difference is focus. With product marketing, companies sell specific items. Brand marketing is about increasing overall recognition in a company's field.

Consider Apple's early TV spots for the iPod.



This ad campaign worked on several levels. The song is catchy and the dancing is cool. The simplicity of the faceless, black dancers against the bright colors helped to distinguish the white iPod. When I saw this commercial I wanted an iPod. The ad campaign was so successful in tapping into my heretofore unknown needs and desires that in addition to selling a product, it positively effected my notion of the brand. Is there anything that Apple can't do?

Why don't book publishers create similar marketing campaigns? I can think of a few possible reasons:

• Publishers have a varied audience that is difficult to reach through standard channels.
• Publishers' products are also varied. It's probably not an effective use of marketing dollars to create catchy tv ads for one book. 
• Publishers are only one party that stands to gain from the sale of a book. Marketing duties are split between publishers, authors, and booksellers, making it easy for marketing to fall through the cracks.

Publishers market individual products, they just don't seem to spend a ton of money on it. Product marketing campaigns might include local newspaper write-ups, release party events, national print ads, TV and radio spots, but a publisher's brand doesn't play to heavily into product marketing. For instance, I have no idea who published the Twilight series, but I recall the black cover, one of them with a red apple on the front. Penguin Books is my only exception. When I scan used book stores for good reads, I always perform a cursory scan for Penguin's orange spines. The orange spines denote contemporary classics, my favorite genre.

Another reason that publishers might not focus on brand marketing has to do with the product. A book often represents an author's brand, with publishers acting as the medium. Creating a strong brand for the publisher might interfere with the message of the physical book, but that could change soon.

Brand marketing is going to be increasingly relevant for publishers looking to succeed in an electronic publishing world. The first step to brand marketing is going to be getting specific about identity. One simple way to accomplish this would be to become a niche publisher. Large publishing houses already have something like this in place with their individual imprints; they just need to to find an online equivalent of Penguin's orange spines.