Brand Marketers & Product Marketers Can’t Afford To Be Frenemies
We love a versus matchup in B2B marketing. It’s either sales versus marketing, or customer success versus customer service, and perhaps most notably, brand marketing versus product marketing.
For Gwen Lafage, VP Marketing, Global Brand and Content, Sinch, and a brand agency veteran, these versus matchups create artificial boundaries, stall team effectiveness, and limit impact. “I wish we could just strip out the word 'versus' from our vocabulary because we're always trying to compete with each other,” she says.
Our competitive mindset creates misunderstandings about what each function contributes. Brand marketers see product marketers as too tactical while product marketers underestimate the strategic value of brand work.
In reality, both roles are key and complementary, especially as companies grow. Gwen adds, “When you have a small company with one platform, it's all integrated. When you become larger with a portfolio of products, you need narratives for each product and an overarching narrative for the brand.”
It's not about choosing side. It's about recognizing how brand and product marketing work better together.
What Do Both Teams Bring To The Table?
Product marketers are strategic connectors. They bridge the gap between product development and sales. Paraphrasing Gwen, they sit at the crossroads between the product and sales teams.
Brand marketers are storytelling architects who take these foundations built by the product marketers and turn them into engaging, clear and emotional narrative. These narratives are used to create stories that resonate with the target audience. “I think when product marketing share the right insights, effectively, it fuels better brand and content marketing campaigns,” she adds.
What Product Marketers Bring To The Table
The product marketer role includes:
- Understanding the market and competition: They identify gaps, trends and shifts
- Defining the target audience: They have to know the customer pain points inside and out.
- Crafting positioning and messaging: They need to ensure the teams run with the right value proposition
- Solving for product-market fit: They make sure demand aligns with the product offering
- Supporting sales enablement: They equip the sales team with the tools they need to sell.
What Brand Marketers Bring To The Table
You’ll often find the brand marketer:
- Framing problems in ways that resonate with customers: They nudge the team to move beyond product features.
- Building memorable storytelling: They create emotional connections with the prospects
- Crafting creative campaigns: They turn the strategy into content and campaigns that drive impact.
- Ensuring visual and brand consistency: They ensure messaging is cohesive across the organization.
- Elevating thought leadership: They position the organization in broader conversations.
5 Best Practices for Collaboration Between Brand and Product Marketing
Gwen references a marketing framework created by Emily Kramer, Creator of MKT1 Newsletter as a great tool for encouraging collaboration between the two teams. The framework categorizes marketing functions into three components:
- Foundation - Product marketing creates the strategic base
- Fuel - Brand and content powers the campaigns
- Engine - Demand generation and field marketing activates the strategies
Read more here: Building an efficient marketing machine.
Without the foundation, campaigns lack strategic direction. Without the fuel, even the best strategies fail to ignite audience interest. And without the engine, brilliant content may never reach its intended audience.
Here are five ways to encourage collaboration between your brand and product marketing teams.
- Understand Each Team's Strengths: “I think it starts with understanding the role and the strengths of each team and making it really clear what those functions are responsible for,” Gwen says. This mutual understanding forms the foundation for effective collaboration.
- Feed Insights Across Teams: Product marketers should consistently share market insights with brand teams. “Feeding that to your brand and content team is key to making better content,” Gwen explains. These insights help align all marketing efforts with customer needs.
- Approach Campaigns With A Holistic Mindset: Rather than creating random acts of marketing, adopt an integrated approach. “It's not like here's a brand campaign and here is a product marketing campaign,” says Gwen. “When you approach it as a full-funnel campaign, it should move seamlessly from brand awareness and education to bottom-funnel demand more focused on the product offering”
- Build Strong Personal Relationships: The relationship between team leaders sets the tone for collaboration. “Building those strong people relationships, having like that mutual trust and respect of what the other does, I think is so essential,” Gwen shares. “If you don't have that at the top of the teams, it's not going to happen.”
- Align on North Star Metrics: While each team may have different KPIs, they should align on overarching goals. “It puts us in a much safer space, to identify what is the KPI we're tracking and how does all you do work towards that,” Gwen notes. This shared direction ensures all efforts contribute to common objectives.
Fin
“For a long time, we've gotten away with huge customer acquisition costs,” Gwen says. “But budgets are tightening, which makes integration even more crucial.”
The marketing organizations that thrive will break down silos and operate as unified teams. The question is no longer about choosing between brand and product marketing.
But rather, it’s about how do we make sure our short-term and long-term strategies work together? How do we ensure that everything we do strengthens each other's work? Because the strongest teams don’t compete: they build together.
What’s Next?
Ready to keep growing? We've got a couple of other resources you might find helpful, such as:
- 30 of the best marketing communities to join and network with brand or product marketers in 2025
- 40 brand purpose examples that have stood the test of time
You should also subscribe to The CMO newsletter to stay on top of trends and get the latest tips, resources, and guides from our community of seasoned marketing leaders straight to your inbox.
