Branding Definition
There’s no shortage of branding definitions or descriptions about the importance of branding. And there are plenty of practitioners who would be more than happy to share their ideas. What I’ve discovered in my years of branding consulting work is that, regardless of your personal favorite branding definition, any of these descriptions can work depending on the context, situation, or what step in the branding process you find yourself. So take them in…and discover what branding is all about.
“A brand is a proper noun that can be used in the place of a common word. ‘What’s a ______?’”
Al Reis
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“A brand is a singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of a prospect.”
Al Reis
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“The brand is nothing more than an ongoing relationship in which a customer exchanges financial value with the marketing organization [your business] for the use of the benefits the brand provides.”
“Brands
are things marketing organizations [that’s your business] use to try
and make more money. Brands are investments for sure. But they need to
pay some returns to the owners. Creating nifty, complex, complicated
advertising concepts generally doesn’t make any money for anyone other
than the babbler.”
Don and Heidi Schultz, Brand Babble
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“A brand is the sum of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the off-strategy. It is defined by your best product as well as your worst product. It is defined by award-winning advertising as well as the god-awful ads that slipped through the cracks, got approved, and, not surprisingly, slipped into oblivion. It is defined by the accomplishments of your best employee—the shining star in the company who can do no wrong—as well as the mishaps of the worst hire you ever made. It is also defined by your receptionist and the music your customers are subjected to when placed on hold. For every grand and finely worded statement by the CEO, the brand is also defined by derisory consumer comments overheard in a hallway, or in a chat room on the Internet. Brands are sponges for content, for images, for fleeting feelings. They become psychological concepts held in the minds of the public, where they may stay forever. As such you can’t entirely control a brand. At best you can only guide and influence it.”
“[Branding]
is a practice…that has always existed above and beyond all other
business strategies. It is an organizing principle so broad yet so
defining that it can shape and direct just about everything a company
does, and, most important, how it does it.”
Scott Bedbury, A New Brand World
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“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.”
Marty Neumeier
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“A brand is more than just advertising and marketing. It is nothing
less that everything anyone thinks of when they see your logo or hear
your name.”
David F. D’Alessandro
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“At its most fundamental level, branding is driven by the human need to distinguish one thing from another.”
DK Holland
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Branding is pre-selling.
Various attributions
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Your brand is the truth about you, well told.
Unknown
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“Branding is simply a more efficient way to sell things.”
Al Reis
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“A brand
is a promise about who you are and what benefits you deliver that gets
reinforced every time people come in contact with any facet of you or
your business.Branding is the process of building a positive collection of perceptions in your customer’s mind.”
Bill Chiaravalle and Barbara Findlay Schenk
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“For a brand to be successful it must first differentiate itself from
the competition in the minds of consumers and this difference must be
relevant. Most important, however, whatever it is that makes it
different or relevant must be simple to understand—to both the people
inside the brand organization and the people outside.”
Allen P. Adamson
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“A
brand is not simply the message the marketer intends to send to a
customer. A brand is the message the customer perceives about the
product, which may be something altogether different than the message
the marketer intended to send.”
Steve Yastrow
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“A
brand is not a product: it is the product’s source, its meaning, and
its direction, and defines its identity in time and space.”
Jean-Noel Kapferer
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“Brands
are a shortcut for people. They are known quantities so people don’t
have to go through an assessment every time they select something.”
Kevin A. Clark
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“A brand is a promise wrapped in an experience—a consistent promise wrapped in a consistent experience.”
Charlie Hughes and William Jeanes
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“Branding
isn’t about ‘getting your name out’ in the marketplace…Branding is
about getting an individual customer to say, ‘I want it!’”
Steve Yastrow
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“A
brand is a unique and identifiable symbol, association, name or
trademark which serves to differentiate competing products or services.
Both a physical and emotional trigger to create a relationship between
consumers and the product/service.”
Allaboutbranding.com
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“Simply
put, a brand is a promise. By identifying and authenticating a product
or service it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality.”
Walter Landor
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“A brand is something that lives in your head. It’s a promise that
links a product or service to a consumer. Whether words, or images, or
emotions, or any combination of the three, brands are mental
associations that get stirred up when you think about or hear about a
particular car or camera, watch, pair of jeans, bank, beverage, TV
network, organization, celebrity, or even country.”
Allen P. Adamson
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“A
set of assets (or liabilities) linked to a brand's name and symbol that
adds to (or subtracts from) the value provided by a product or
service…”
David Aaker
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“Branding
is the creation, development and maintenance of a mutually-valuable
relationship with a strategically selected group of customers, through
the medium of a fresh and compelling elaborated proposition that is
delivered consistently over time by an artificial personality.”
Mud Valley
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“A brand is an identifiable entity that makes specific promises of value.”
Dave Dolak
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“Brands are avenues of value innovation in a creative engagement between companies and their customers.”
Tenaya Group
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“Developing
and consistently communicating a group of positive characteristics and
associations that are anchored to an established emotional truism.”
Roy H. Williams, Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads
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“Branding
is simply attaching something to your name. A brand is the sum total of
all the mental associations, good and bad, that are triggered by a
name.”
Roy H. Williams, Magical Worlds of the Wizard of Ads
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“Brands
are defined by the customer. They exist as a feeling that extends
beyond the product itself. The brand experience includes your marketing,
customer service, even feelings shared customer to customer.”
T. Scot Gross, Micro Branding
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“[Prediction of what to expect] x [emotional power of that expectation] = a brand.”
Seth Godin
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“A brand is nothing but an expression of the consumer’s loyalty and trust.”
Phil Dusenberry, One Great Insight is Worth a Thousand Good Ideas
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“In
the public’s eye, a brand is a warranty. It is a promise that the
service carrying that brand will live up to its name, and perform.”
Harry Beckwith, Selling the Invisible
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“Brands are decision-making shortcuts in a world of people like you looking for shortcuts.”
Harry Beckwith, Selling the Invisible
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“Your
brand works in two directions: It works in the way we typically think,
as attracting buyers with the brand’s implicit promise of quality. But
the brand also works at the level of the second key pool of prospects:
prospective employees. Because you are more than your brand; you are the
people who represent it, manage it, and carry out its promises, and the
more compelling your brand, the more easily you can recruit that
exceptional talent you need to continue to deliver exceptional results.”
Harry Beckwith, The Invisible Touch
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“Simply
stated, a brand is a recognizable person, place, or thing. Our job as
marketers is to create brands that are separate and distinct from
similar products or services offered by competitors. It’s all about
differentiation.”
Steve Cone, Steal These Ideas!
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“If
you want to build a successful brand, you have to understand
divergence. You have to look for opportunities to create new categories
by divergence of existing categories. And then you have to become the
first brand in this emerging new category.”
Al & Laura Ries, The Origin of Brands
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“A
Killer Brand exists when an entity derives a disproportionate amount of
success in its category because of a compelling and differentiated
expectation that comes to be associated with its name.”
Frank Lane, Killer Brands
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“Brand
refers to the set of characteristics that arise in a customer’s mind
when that person hears your name or sees your logo.”
Bill Chiaravalle, Branding for Dummies
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“Branding
simply involves developing and consistently communicating a group of
positive characteristics that consumers can identify with and relate to
your name.”
Barbara Findlay Schenck, Small Business Marketing for Dummies
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“A
brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of
them, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group
of sellers and differentiate them from those of the competition.”
American Marketing Association
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“A brand is essentially a container for a customer’s complete experience with the product or company.”
Sergio Zyman, The End of Advertising As We Know It
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"Branding
is a methodical influence on the creation of beliefs in the consumer's
mind. These beliefs pertain to a brand's 'instrumentality,' meaning the
degree to which it enables consumers to achieve, do, or be what they
want."
Dan Herman, Outsmart the MBA Clones
See what other thought leaders think branding is here
