Merry Christmas! I hope you do something good for someone else today. I hope to you spend some time with those you love, doing things you love, and showing love in the things you do. Marketing is about telling stories to an audience that are compelling enough to cause them to make a decision. If your marketing isn’t compelling people to make decision, it’s not effective marketing.In Marketing, we tell all kinds of stories. Stories about the product, stories about our audience. Stories about how our company came to be, and stories about the projects we’re working on.Furthermore, marketing allows our audience to tell stories themselves. Stories about what their life will be like with our product. Stories about their own background. Stories about what they want in life. Our marketing material is supposed to provide our audience with that ability.Branding is a subset of these stories. Specifically, branding is the story we tell others about ourselves, and it’s the story we want our audience to tell about us.Branding is not about your origin story or how you came to be, it’s about the story you tell with your imagery and the experience your customer has. Basically, branding takes place in two facets, what someone sees before they become a customer, and what someone feels after they become a customer.Amazon has a brand that has expansive imagery. When you visit the website, you see every product. They have more categories than most stores have square feet. That’s what you see.Amazon’s backend branding is the feeling a customer gets knowing they will get free 2-day shipping, free returns, customer care 24/7, and a ridiculously easy checkout process to kick it all off.It’s all part of their marketing, but the positioning Amazon has done to portray themselves as the everything store is their branding.