And you can have marketing without branding. The stuff I sell doesn’t have any branding.
This bigger person in me should let this go, but what can I say, I’m a pedant!
For some reason, you seem to be not only in disagreement, but positively disparaging of the role of design and branding. I had a look at your unbranded site and frankly some of the things you have to say about design are, at best, misleading and in fact, simply not true. Particularly:
Don’t worry about the layout
The colours, fonts, images, borders, background, layout and everything else really don’t matter.
You might wish that to be so, but I am afraid there are many accredited, academic studies (I know, I read a whole load of them when I studied this very subject for my own thesis) – not opinion-based theories – that will firmly contradict that statement. Layout does matter. Where information is placed in the field of vision does matter. Whether it is text or image does matter. Typography does matter. People take all sort of emotional and cultural cues from typography. Not only from the design of the font itself, but how it is used. To dismiss years of academic research in one swathing sentence is more that a little surprising and from a designer’s perspective somewhat irksome.
I think you and the rest of us are never going to see eye-to-eye on the branding / marketing issue. However, I would just say that despite the assumption that none of us have spoken to Marketing people, I’m sure many of us have worked with directly with marketing departments over the years. In my experience (which may not be as broad as some of the others here), your understanding is not one I have ever heard from any of the marketing people I have had dealings with. I have worked with companies from full-service blue-chip-client design agencies with their own marketing departments, to international publishers and my experiences consistently differ from yours.
Hank is probably right though; we should stop this before it becomes too much of a bun-fight.