I think it's clear that it's talking about two different aspects of the same thing.
I've thought about it a great deal. And still feel that there is an element of division in the terminology.
I've been involved in the development of a new product before. And yes marketing were involved from the get go.
The product was pitched by an internal employee. They went for it.
Marketing organised a bunch of different user groups to come in - paid for of course - who went through the product and got to ask questions etc.
This provided feedback to the team development. Of course these users were knowledgeable on the subject so were able to give valuable feedback.
Next stage was the development of the UI and the UX. For this part they got in 10 focus groups. 5 knowledgable on the subject the UI/UX was searching and 5 not knoweledgeable. Each group had 20 people.
Each person was give a serious of tasks to complete using the UI/UX that was in development. The UI/UX was a just a skin - nothing fancy at this stage.
Each group was asked to give feedback on how they found their tasks.
This enabled the UI and UX teams to work on feedback on usabilty of the software and the UI and their UX.
This had nothing to do with branding at this stage.
They were just getting a feel of it from people who understood the subject and who didn't, if they liked it or didn't like it etc.
The next part was far more involved for me - having divided the Ui and UX into usable portions of what will work and won't work and how the UI and UX was going to work, I was tasked with branding it.
This was very complex, I had to consider the entire scope of the project, not just from a UI or UX perspective. And the feedback from the Market didn't really concern me. That was all UI and UX focused and data and content etc.
Once it was decided this product was viable - I was then able to sit down with the Management and talk to them.
They had to tell me the audience, the market, the competitors, and all the other things.
I had to go away and develop 3 different brand ideas for the product.
Once I had the branding sorted.
Only then was I able to send it on to the marketing team for them to decide the marketing strategy.
Once they had all the pieces from conversations with the branding team - considerations they didn't even know they had to consider.
The marketing team was able to use the branding - send the branding book to anyone on the planet and get the same branded marketing materials generated anywhere.
But there's a huge division between the Market Research / Branding / Marketing.
They are all the same thing to some people - but there's distinct models behind them.