What is a Brand?

THE ORIGIN OF BRANDS

Brands date back to earliest recorded history when they were used to indicate the origin of a product and information about its quality. As far back as 2250 BCE, researchers have found evidence of brands being used by craftspeople and merchants in trade. They often took the form of seals featuring pictorial symbols and text. Brands (stamping with embers or hot irons) were also used to identify harlots or wrongdoers and to identify livestock ownership.

(Source: Karl Moore and Susan Reid, “The Birth of Brand: 4000 Years of Branding,” Business History 50, no. 4, July 2008, pp. 419-432.)

The American Marketing Association describes a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them

from those of competition.”

More important, a brand is the source of a promise to the consumer. It promises relevant differentiated benefits. Everything an organization does should be focused on enhancing delivery against its brand’s promise.

Combining a few different definitions, a brand is the name and symbols that identify:

• The source of a relationship with the consumer

• The source of a promise to the consumer

• The unique source of products and services

• The single concept that you own inside the mind of the prospect (according to brand management experts Al Ries and Laura Ries, in their book The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding)

• The sum total of each customer’s experience with your organization

Finally, another way to think about brands is that they are personifications of organizations and their products and services. In this way, brands can hold certain values, have specific personalities, possess admirable qualities, stand for something, make promises, and create emotional connections with people.

Source: Brand Aid, second edition, available here.

What is a Brand?

Over the years, I have heard dozens of different definitions of what a brand is. Here are some of my favorites:

1. A brand is the personification of an organization or its products or services.
2. Because of this, a brand can stand for something, have a certain set of values, possess specific personality attributes and relate to people on an emotional level.
3. Also, because of this, a brand can make promises. It should promise relevant differentiated benefits. And, more importantly, it should demonstrate integrity by consistently delivering on those promises.
4. Brands tend to be associated with one or two specific things in people's minds. Ideally, the dominant linkage is with its promise of relevant differentiated benefits (that is, its unique value proposition).
5. A brand is the sum total of experiences and associations with its identity (name, logo, etc.).

Purchase Brand Aid, second edition here.

A Brand is a Friend

The following story best illustrates what brand equity is.

Imagine you are having lunch with a longtime and very good friend. Several times throughout the lunch, she makes disparaging and sarcastic remarks that make you feel bad. You think to yourself, “This just isn’t like her. She must be having a bad day.” You meet with her again a week or two later, and again she acts ornery and negative. You think to yourself, “Something must be going on in her life that she’s really struggling with. Maybe she is having difficulties with her job or her health or her marriage or her children.” You may even ask her if everything is all right. She snaps back, “Of course it is.”

Your interaction with her continues in this vein over the next couple of months. You continue to try to be supportive, but she’s definitely getting on your nerves. After many meetings and much interaction, you finally decide that she’s a changed person and someone with whom you prefer to spend less and less time. You may get to this point after a few months, or perhaps even after a year or more. She doesn’t change, and eventually the relationship peters out.

Now consider for a moment that the person you first had lunch with is the same person as before, with one exception: She is a total stranger to you. You haven’t met her previously and she is not your dear friend. I would guess that after enduring many caustic comments and being insulted a few times at that lunch, your first impression wouldn’t be very positive. In fact, you’d probably be inclined not to get together with that person again. You’d probably walk away from that lunch thinking, “What a miserable person. I hope I don’t run into her again.”

In both of these scenarios it is the same person behaving the same way in the same situation. Yet in the first scenario, you are very quick to forgive the behavior. In fact, you feel a lot of concern toward her. In the second scenario, you can’t wait for the lunch to be over and you hope never to see the person again.

In the first scenario, the person was a longtime good friend. She had a lot of equity with you. In the second scenario, she had no equity at all. You see, if people or brands have a lot of equity—that is, if you know, like, and trust them—you will “cut them a lot of slack” even if they repeatedly fail to meet your expectations. If a person, product, service, or organization has no equity with you, no emotional connection, and no trust, then you are much less inclined to forgive unmet expectations.

© 2015 Brad VanAuken
Excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition

What is a brand?

Over time, I have heard people define "brand" in many different ways. Following are some of the most useful ways to think about brands:

• A brand is the personification of an organization or its products and services. Because of this, a brand can possess certain values, have a specific personality, make promises and emotionally connect with people.
• A brand is the source of a promise to its intended audiences. It should promise something unique and compelling. It then needs to consistently deliver on that promise.
• A brand is owned in the mind of its customers. 
• A brand typically has one or two primary associations. That is, it tends to stand for one or, at the most, two very specific things in people's minds.
• A brand is responsible for moving a product or service from commodity status to something that is differentiated and for which people are willing to pay a price premium.
• A brand's perceptions are formed by all of the experiences that one has with the brand.

“Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room.” Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com

What is a brand?

Here are some of my favorite definitions of what a brand is but I hope that you will also add your favorites to the list.

• A brand is the source of a promise to its customers. It promises relevant, differentiated benefits.
• A brand is the personification of an organization and its products or services. It has a personality and character and can be trusted or not.
• A brand resides in the mind of the customer. It is the sum total of all experiences and associations that the customer has with it.
• A brand consists of identity elements that link to associations in the customer’s mind.
• A brand is a gut feeling about an organization and its products and services.
• A brand is a promise consistently made backed by an experience consistently delivered.
• The primary indicator of a brand is the ability to charge a price premium over commodities in the same product/service category.
• A brand indicates the unique source of a product or service.
• The brand is the story behind an organization and its products and services.
• A brand is the identity applied to an organization and it products and services.
• A brand is the value delivered above and beyond the functional value of the product or service (or the book value of an organization).