Building brands takes time, effort and carefully crafted strategy that doesn’t give many slip-ups along the way. Brand building is not creating a name in the market. Names remain just tags that producers of products use to call their merchandise. When brands are built, it is the image that the consumer associates with the company or its product that rules. Brands reside in the minds of the consumer and hence, they are built with a lot of care.

It is a wrong notion that Sales and Marketing are twin faces of the same coin; sales and marketing are coupled together in such a way as if they are virtually inseparable. To the contrary, the sales function, practically, is mono-dimensional. Selling, as an organisational function, is about increasing turnover, revenue and cash flow.

Sales people are, in general, tuned at increasing the value of products sold every month, every quarter and every year. When there is a slowdown, when cash flow is a problem, the Sales function immediately takes charge to rectify the situation and to make sure products fly off the shelf. And in most cases, the strategies adopted by the Sales Department are promotions, price-cuts and displays to increase awareness.

This strategy doesn’t work, however, in cases where Marketing plays a more important role in the selling of the product, than does the Sales Function. To illustrate, the French Champagne market thrives during the New Year, with the product being associated with festivities and celebration. And champagne is a product that has an image about itself. The French look forward towards their Champagne consumption as a relishing way to rejoice.

However, this is recession time, where people have less money to spend and companies have even lesser money to invest and run their operations. This has led to some of the French Champagne brands go for blatant reductions in their prices, in their efforts to make champagne affordable and enticing enough for people to go for it. From the company’s perspective, this is good Sales strategy.

However, what it does to the champagne brand is something else – these steep price cuts undermine the sheen associated with champagne as a connoisseur’s delicacy. With champagne bottles available for less than 10 Euros, the aura associated with the product is sacrificed for short-term contingencies. Well, champagne is a branded product and its sales come under the Marketing Department’s purview!

Sales and Marketing are indispensible, yet unique, facets of the organisation, which often clash with each other in the company’s pursuit of profits and market share.