One of the most important aspects of strategy in modern business is “Branding”. Western companies were the first to realize the power of strong brands and invested heavily in building them. The big example is Coca-Cola. Then followed Japanese with Sony & Toyota leading their way. Only recently, the Eastern companies are realizing the importance of branding and today Samsung is benchmarked along with its top rival brands from Western World. In the past all these Eastern companies where functioning as a low cost manufacturing based for their Western counterparts.
There are many advantages of owning a powerful brand, not just an option of premium pricing. But building a brand is a costly and consistent affair. Also brand is often misunderstood merely as an advertising function and is therefore widely mismanaged.
In good old days, branding was adopted to differentiate one person's cattle from another's by means of a distinctive symbol burned into the animal's skin with a hot iron stamp. And if we go through marketing books you will see the official definition of a brand as, “a brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or design which is intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors”.
But if you come across the advertising man like me, they might define brand as a collection of perceptions in the minds of a consumer. If I have to elaborate this, I would say that it is a mental impression of an experience offered by a product or service. An experience is the sum total of what we have seen, learn and undergone, and recorded in our memory. And mostly importantly we should not forget the fact that an experience is always coloured by our environment, our values, our beliefs, our social and economic standing, our cultural heritage, and our needs.
Traditional business people used to assume