Brief Introduction of Branding

A brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme. A brand is a symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to a company, product or service. A brand serves to create associations and expectations among products made by a producer. A brand often includes an explicit logo, fonts, color schemes, symbols, sound which may be developed to represent implicit values, ideas, and even personality.

The Dictionary of Business and Management defines a brand as:

“a name, sign or symbol used to identify items or services of the seller(s) and to differentiate them from goods of competitors.

Walter Landor said:
“Simply put, a brand is a promise. By identifying and authenticating a product or service it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality.”

Brands came about as a way to identity a companies’ products from similar products of rival businesses, but branding could also be used to disguise an inferior product as one of higher quality; in ancient China, merchants sometimes used branding to falsely pass off lower grade garden tea as higher grade hill tea, by using names such as “Misty Mountain Tea”, or “Garden in the Sky Tea”.

A brand is all about how a customer perceives a product or company. A successful brand is recognisable and creates an instant association with a product or service. For example, people see a Nirulas Restaurant, and they know they can get food quickly there.

A brand which is widely known in the marketplace acquires brand recognition. When brand recognition builds up to a point where a brand enjoys a critical mass of positive sentiment in the marketplace, it is said to have achieved brand franchise. One goal in brand recognition is the identification of a brand without the name of the company present. For example, Disney has been successful at branding with their particular script font, which it used in the logo for go.com.

The highest level of achievement in the world of branding is to create a brand that is instantly recognisable even without the name of the company present. This takes years of marketing and huge amounts of investment; companies that have achieved this include Nike (with its “swoosh”), McDonald’s (with its Golden Arches), Playboy (with the Playboy Bunny) and several car manufacturers such as Mercedes, Maruti and Mitsubishi.

These days, companies spend thousands of dollar building and promoting their brands, keeping up on the latest media news and advancements. A company’s brand is vital to its success and therefore it’s imperative that a company monitors its brand image to ensure that it is being perceived in the way it wants to be.