by Dante de Miura

Created on: March 28, 2009   Last Updated: March 30, 2009

Ever wonder what a "brand" is? If you've been an active consumer the last 20 years or so, you've likely heard the term and come to have an idea based on your experiences. While many people are quick with answers, the raw definition for those wanting to deep-dive into semantics, philosophy and theory is not so accessible. While ultimately, on the front-end, what a brand means to you as a consumer is whatever you believe it to represent in your life, practitioners of brand building have to understand it differently at first on the back-end. Before discerning what makes up a brand - typically the best way to define what it is - consider understanding what a brand is not.

A brand is not a name or logo or look or website or advertisement. Those things are exactly what you presume them to be - names, logos, looks, ads, etc. Additionally, and along the same lines, a brand is not the product, the box it comes in or the store where you bought it. What then is a brand? Ultimately, empirically, a brand is a set of perceptions around that product/store/box/logo/name/buying experience, etc. Professionals in brand development and management could also be called managers of perception.

The act of "branding" is the work of actively managing advantageous perceptions. This is not twisted and underhanded. As long as the perceptions they are trying to trigger with you are true, meaningful and differentiating from their competition, this is what's called smart marketing. Why are brand and perceptions linked and considered such an important part of marketing? Because essentially (save a very rare exceptions) there are no best products or services out there. There are only best perceived products and services. This is not to suggest that a brand is simply whatever its corporate owner says it is.

Quite the opposite. A brand is what you, the consumer, says it is. If your perception of a brand marketed to you is different than the company's idea of what the brand is, then there exists a disconnect, or what is called a brand gap. This is one reason why so much time and money is spent on product design, functionality, packaging, purchasing experience, customer service, promotional design, messaging and advertising. The other reason is because building a strong brand is tantamount to a company's long-term success. Many years ago, Pepsi thought it had uncovered the silver bullet that was going to launch the company right passed Coca-Cola.

The results of national blind taste tests suggested that most people preferred the taste of Pepsi over Coke. Because of this, we heard some Pepsi executives were convinced they would overtake the cola leader. Some time later, we learned a third-party company conducted the same test without the blindfolds. In this test, consumers knew exactly which beverage they were tasting. The result? More people claimed that Coke tasted better. Many considered this the final answer: the strength of the Coca-Cola brand overrode the functional benefit of taste. It wasn't about the best product, it was about the brands.

And so it goes in the world of branding. Companies can sit around and see how we feel over time about their products and services and let us define for them what the perceptions of their brands will be, or they can become more proactive and tap our emotions, likes, hobbies, cultures and values and help manage our perceptions to the kinds of brands we would want to become involved with and connected to. And essentially, that is the outcome of good branding. To connect to us in ways competitive brands do not. But no matter what they do, say or spend, consumers always have the last word on branding.

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