Somehow the marketing world does not seem to be able to agree on one definition of a brand. Although most seem to pretty much agree on what it is, we don’t seem to have found a universal way of putting it into words. So I thought it would be interesting to see how various experts throughout the years have put it into words…
So here we go…
Your brand is what people say about you when you leave the room.
– Jeff Bezos, Amazon
A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.
– Seth Godin
Brand is the sum total of how someone perceives a particular organization. Branding is about shaping that perception.
– Ashley Friedlein, Econsultancy
Brand is the image people have of your company or product. It’s who people think you are. Or quoting Ze Frank, it’s the “emotional aftertaste” that comes after an experience (even a second-hand one) with a product, service or company.
– Ann Handley, MarketingProfs
A brand is essentially a seller’s promise to deliver a specific set of features, benefits, and services consistently to the buyer. The best brands convey a warranty of quality. But a brand is an even more complex symbol. It can convey up to six levels of meaning:
- Attributes: A brand brings to mind certain attributes…
- Benefits: Attributes must be translated into the functional benefit…
- Values: The brand also says something about the producer’s values…
- Culture: The brand may represent a certain culture…
- Personality: The brand can project a certain personality…
- User: The brand suggests the kind of consumer who buys or uses the product…
– Philip Kotler, Marketing Management
Brand is the promise, the big idea, and the expectations that reside in each customer’s mind about a product, service or a company. People fall in love with brands, trust them, develop strong loyalties to them, buy them and believe in their superiority. The brand is shorthand. It stands for something.
– Alina Wheeler, Designing Brand Identity
Products are created in the factory. Brands are created in the mind.
– Walter Landor, Founder of Landor Associates.
Brand is not what you say it is. It is what they say it is.
– Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap
A brand is a “trust mark.” It’s shorthand. It’s a sorting device.
– Tom Peters, Brand You
In a world that is bewildering in terms of competitive clamour, in which rational choice has become almost impossible, brands represent clarity, reassurance, consistency, status, membership – everything that enables human beings to help define themselves. Brands represent identity.
– Wally Olins, On Brand
Although the product has a name, a trademarked logo, unique packaging, and perhaps other unique design features – all aspects that we intuitively think of as the brand – the brand does not yet truly exist. Names, logos and designs are the material markers of the brand. Because the product does not yet have a history, however, these markers are empty. They are devoid of meaning. Now, think of famous brands. They have markers, also: a name … a logo … a distinctive product design feature … or any other design element that is uniquely associated with the product. The difference is these makers have been filled with customer experiences. Advertisements, films, and sporting events use the brand as a prop. Magazines and newspaper articles evaluate the brand, and people talk about the brand in conversation. Over time, ideas about the product accumulate and fill the brand markers with meaning. A brand is formed.
A brand emerges as various “authors” tell stories that involve the brand …
Brand stories have plots and characters, and they rely heavily on metaphor to communicate and to spur our imaginations. As these stories collide in everyday social life, conventions eventually form. Sometimes a single common story emerges as a consensus view. Most often, though, several different stories circulate widely in society. A brand emerges when these collective understandings become firmly established.
Marketeers often like to think of brands as a psychologial phenomenon which stems from the perceptions of individual consumers. But what makes a brand powerful is the collective nature of these perceptions; the stories have become conventional and so are continually reinforced because they are treated as truths in everyday interactions.
– Douglas B. Holt, How Brands Become Icons
A successful brand is an identifiable product, service, person or place, augmented in such a way that the buyer or user perceives relevant, unique added values which match their needs most closely. Furthermore, its success results from being able to sustain these added values in the face of competition.
– Leslie de Chernatony & Malcolm McDonald, Creating Powerful Brandes
A brand is … a product, but one that adds other dimensions that differentiate it in some way from other products designed to satisfy the same need.
– Kevin Lane Keller
More specifically, what distinguishes a brand from its unbranded commodity counterpart and gives it equity is the sum total of consumer’s perceptions and feelings about the product’s attributes and how they perform, about the brand name and what it stands for, and about the company associated with the brand.
– Alvin A. Achenbaum (as quoted in Strategic Brand Management by Kevin Lane Keller)
A brand is “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised”.
– David Ogilvy
A brand is a singular idea or concept that you won inside the mind of a prospect.
– Al Ries
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