A brand is a group of images and ideas which represents an economic producer; specifically, it means concrete symbols including name, sign, symbol, color combination or slogan. A brand is a symbolic embodiment of all the information associated with an organization, service or product. A brand helps to create associations and expectations among goods produced by a manufacturer.
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.
The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a “Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.”
A well-known brand is usually perceived as one which consumers will recognize, even if they have no idea about the business or its products/services. These are typically the businesses name or the name of the product or service, even though it may also include the name of a attribute or style of a product or service. For example, people see a Nirulas Restaurant, and they know they can get food quickly there.
Brands came about as a means to identity a companies’ products and solutions from comparable products and solutions of competing businesses, but branding could also be utilized to conceal a substandard product as one of good quality; in medieval China, vendors occasionally made use of branding to falsely pass off low quality garden tea as high quality hill tea, through the use of names like “Misty Mountain Tea”, or “Garden in the Sky Tea”.
A brand that is well known in the industry develops brand recognition. When brand recognition grows to a degree where a brand enjoys a critical mass of favourable sentiment in the industry, it is known to have attained brand franchise. A goal in brand recognition is the identification of a brand without the presense of company name. This requires many years of marketing and large amounts of investment; businesses which have attained this include Nike (with its “swoosh”), McDonald’s (with its Golden Arches), Playboy (with the Playboy Bunny) and many auto producers like Mercedes, Maruti and Mitsubishi. For instance, Disney has been effective at branding using their specific script font, which it employed in the logo for go.com.
Nowadays, businesses invest thousands of dollar developing and promoting their brands, keeping up on the newest media news and advancements. A company’s brand is critical to its success and for that reason it’s essential that a company monitors its brand image to make sure that it’s being perceived in a way it wants to be.