WHAT IS A BRAND?

MEANING OF A BRAND

Per Philip Kotler define Brand as a name, sign, symbol, or design intended to distinguish the goods and services of one seller from another and to differentiate them from those 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. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller. If used for the firm as a whole, the preferred term is trade name."

Brand is the name or trademark used to identify a product by its makers. It is the output of a company’s initiatives, creativity and operation, which allows the company’s image to be judged by its services and products. The brand should be so attractive that it should receive the admiration of the potential customers, the shareholders and distributors. After all, it is the brand, which is the visible manifestation of the company that provides the wealth and profit on which the company survives in the competitive market. Brand building involves a lot of creativity, ingenuity in the packaging and the message that goes with such as its values, design and promotional jingles. It may not be simply produced, but it entails painstaking research, and the use of mass-communication through appropriate mass media for expected mass response, which results to its mass production to satisfy the mass of its consumers. Therefore, brand building should be sustained in such a way that it engenders more loyalty.

A brand can take many forms, including a name, sign, symbol, color combination or slogan. The word branding began simply as a way to tell one person's cattle from another by means of a hot iron stamp. The word brand has continued to evolve to encompass identity — it affects the personality of a product, company or service.