Branding

Generally speaking, in and out of academic circles, people agree that brands play a central role in marketing. Introduced during XVIII century as symbols standing for quality and tradition, brands suddenly became a pervasive socio-economic phenomenon. Due to the astonishing variety of effects revealed by their impact on emerging cultures, brands stimulated a lot of excitement and interest among marketing practitioners for over a century. Researchers analyzed the subject by many different perspectives, focusing on both psychological and sociological concerns, as well as economical… how could you doubt it? Today, most of authors and practitioners agree to the following brand definition:

A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.
— AMA

Of course, this is just the beginning, as further levels of investigation and understanding involved discussion on various dimensions like personality, equity, image, value system… Nonetheless, it looks like the brand notion is rather an empty shell that is used to sum up many things, but is meaningless in itself. So branding builds upon the idea of differentiation. Uniqueness of names, terms, signs and symbols are the means by which they get recognized in a crowded, competitive and complex marketplace.

Brands are closely linked to products, in general. They actually embody the promise to satisfy a specific mix of properties, services and benefits. You’ll notice this phenomenon whenever hearing something like: “Hey man, you bought an Apple”, or similar. However, literature typically conceptualizes brands in a different manner from that of products, even if they are, more often than not, treated as synonyms in real life. In fact, it usually happens to hear someone say: «I wear brand-name» or «I only buy brand-name». That’s because owner companys are able to attribute value to their brands over time in such a way that they become products by themselves. The substance of values accrued to the brand, hopefully as an outcome of a clever marketing strategy, is generally referred to as the brand equity. Despite the efforts spent in transforming and measuring such a value in economic terms, I’d like to point out that brands are foundamentally symbolic relations to meanings, which are negotiated during the social discourse and, as such, they only get relevance in a social contest. So you can rightfully question about the opportunity of such a conversion.

Considering that brands are becoming instrumental for a variety of social purposes in complex contemporary societies (as resources for developing personal identity projects or establishing communities, just to name a few), actual distinctions operated between products, logos, messages, etc., look obsolete… at best…