Branding is the foundation of marketing and is inseparable from business strategy. It is therefore more than putting a label on a fancy product. Nowadays a corporation, law firm, country, university, museum, hospital, celebrity and even we in our career can be considered as a brand. As such a brand is a combination of attributes, communicated through a name or a symbol that influences a thought-process in the mind of an audience andcreates value.
As branding is deeply anchored in psycho-sociology, it takes into account both tangible and intangible attributes.For example functional and emotional benefits. Therefore those attributes compose the beliefs that the brand's audience recalls when they think about the brand in its context.
The value of a brand resides for the audience in the promise that the product or service will deliver. Clearly a brand can recall memories of a bad experience. The value for the audience then would be to avoid purchasing that brand.
From the perspective of the brand's owner, the value of the brand often lies in the security of higher future earnings but may also be assessed in terms of votes for a politician, career for an executive, foreign direct investments (FDI) for a country, etc.
In conclusion, branding is the blend of art and science that manages associations between a brand and memories in the mind of the brand's audience. It involves focusing resources on selected tangible and intangible attributes to differentiate the brand in an attractive, meaningful and compelling way for the targeted audience.
Brand management then becomes the organizational framework that systematically manages those customer-centric processes. It aims at gathering intelligence, allocating resources, and consistently delivering the brand promise over time at each contact-point with the customer.
For example Coca-Cola has become a cliché of brand management. Before branding or even management emerged as disciplines, the Atlanta-based company was already spending over US$ 11,000 on a mass advertising campaign as early as 1892. Its trademark was officially filed in the US that year and has consistently been displayed with the same script to this day. Over time it also associated its brand with a bright red color, the hour-glass shaped bottle (1915) and the ribbon logo (1970). Together these aspects contribute to differentiating Coke from rivals such as Pepsi-Cola, which has applied a competitive pressure since 1898.
