brand (marketing)

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Breakfast cereals on the shelves of a grocery store.

© Kenishirotie/Dreamstime.com

brand (marketing), a set of words, images, and associations that represent and distinguish a product or service in the marketplace. Strong brands elicit an emotional response from consumers and add value to the products and services they represent. Manufacturers have identified their products with names or symbols for thousands of years, and in the 20th century brands became not only critical to the promotion of goods and services but valuable assets in themselves. With the shift toward digital commerce in the 21st century, brands continue to be valuable but face new challenges because of the greater accessibility of information about products and services, the companies that produce or offer them, and the performance history of the branded offerings. 

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A Holstein-Friesian dairy cow with an identification number freeze-branded on her flank. Lancashire, England.

Wayne Hutchinson/Alamy

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The branding punishment of French Huguenot John Leclerc in 1525, 19th-century illustration.

From: "History of the Great Reformation in Europe, in the Times of Luther and Calvin" by J. H. Merle d'Aubigné, 1870

The term brand originates from the Middle English word for torch and the Old English verb meaning “to burn,” as well as from the historic practice of identifying goods with the mark of a firebrand (a burning piece of wood) and, later, a hot or cold iron. The branded “goods” might be the assets themselves (as with the hot-iron branding of cattle, a practice common as far back as ancient Egypt) or the barrels and boxes containing the products. Even enslaved people and criminals, for purposes of identification and punishment, have been branded throughout history.

Producers have been marking their goods for millennia—there are stones, for example, from ancient Egypt marked with a symbol of the quarry they hail from that are 6,000 years old and Chinese pottery marked to indicate the potter who made it that are from 4,000 to 5,000 years old. The use of brand names to denote manufacturers became widespread in Europe in the late Middle Ages. Such branding soon became legally mandated. In 1266 the English Parliament enacted a law requiring bakers to mark loaves of bread made for sale, and, in the centuries that followed, European courts developed a body of law protecting the rights of producers to own their names and marks. 

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Advertisement for Tabasco sauce, 1905.

McIlhenny Company Archives, Avery Island, La.

With the rise of industrial-scale manufacturing and the widespread geographical distribution of products, reliable identification of goods became increasingly important, as consumers no longer purchased directly from local producers. By the late 19th century, manufacturers of all kinds were using stylized text, logos, and color schemes not just to identify their goods but to distinguish them in a crowded marketplace through promises of superior quality or value. Advertising agencies also emerged, notably J. Walter Thompson Co., which pioneered early techniques of using magazine advertisements to connect products with generalized associations such as the longing for luxury, security, or love. Coca-Cola, Ivory Soap, and Colgate all emerged as brands during this period with the support of extensive advertising campaigns. 

The reach and evocative power of mass media, such as radio and especially television, facilitated the modern era of branding. Manufacturers, led by American consumer packaged goods companies, began investing heavily in advertising, not just to raise awareness of their brands but to build specific emotional associations with their products. Brand management thus became an organizational concept. Procter & Gamble Company was a pioneer in such brand management, rejecting the notion of a single corporate marketing department and instead putting each of its branded products (e.g., Ivory, Tide, Crest, Crisco) under a separate management team, responsible for identifying a specific consumer segment and building a brand to appeal to that specific kind of buyer. By the 1950s, this strategy had become the standard marketing model in consumer-goods companies.

The overall strategy for success at that time was rather simple: drive down costs using mass production, invest the savings in mass media ad campaigns that imbued the brands with emotional resonance, and then make a profit by charging prices for the branded product that were higher than those charged by generic producers or those with weaker brands—prices that consumers would gladly pay because they valued the emotional connection they had with the stronger brand. The latter half of the 20th century was a period of increased sophistication, investment, and profitability in brand-based marketing. Marketers refined their message based on focus groups, consumer surveys, and data collected through retailers, and they expanded their reach through event sponsorships (such as the Super Bowl) and film and television product placement. Additionally, they owned and operated brand-specific retail stores.

The rise of the Internet, however, profoundly challenged the branding models of the 20th century. The controlled one-way messaging strategy so effective in mass media did not always translate well to the interactive online environment. Leading brands spent millions of dollars on “brochureware” websites (websites that simply listed their products and services online, akin to listing their products in a static brochure) that sparked limited consumer interest. Meanwhile, the disruptive effect of the new marketing channel allowed new brands to emerge as well as new types of intermediaries between product manufacturers and consumers, including review websites, pricing agents, and search engines. Consumers grew less reliant on the brands themselves to signal quality or value.

In a crowded, competitive marketplace, a brand and its associations convey the unique selling proposition of a product. This includes both rational attributes, such as price and quality, and emotional attributes, such as prestige, freedom, or reliability. Retailers often position themselves squarely on the rational benefit of price. Walmart, for example, has relied on a variety of slogans to communicate low prices, such as “Every Day Low Prices” and “Save Money. Live Better.” Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus, on the other hand, flaunts its high prices, featuring outrageously expensive “fantasy gifts” in its holiday catalogs. Recent offerings from the latter included a $6.1 million diamond ring and a $285,000 electric pickup truck.

American Express is a classic example of a brand that combines rational associations (conveying itself as a reliable, secure partner for expensive transactions) with aspirational, emotional ones (prestige, upward mobility, luxury). For years, the company spent heavily on advertising that featured familiar celebrities (including actor Karl Malden, director Martin Scorsese, singer Sheryl Crow, and athlete Shaun White) who relied on the American Express card. The advertising was combined with a product strategy that supplemented the credit card with a suite of complimentary travel rewards and perks. Advertisements promised American Express cardholders unique, luxury experiences that differentiated the brand from its competition, such as Visa and Mastercard.

Brands offer consumers a means of expressing themselves privately and publicly. Whereas early advertisements simply promoted the product, sophisticated marketers realized they could build stronger emotional connections if they focused on what their brands said about users of their product. During the peak of the feminist movement in the 1960s and early ʾ70s, cigarette brand Virginia Slims built a business on this strategy by touting the progress women had made in recent years, using its famous tagline: “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Nike, with the slogan “Just Do It,” became the global leader in athletic footwear by focusing its brand on the efforts and achievements of Nike-wearers instead of on the shoes themselves. As smart brand marketers discovered, humans are social animals who are constantly on the lookout for ways to signal their success and value to others.

Some product categories are inherently well suited to “self-expressive benefits” and branding that helps consumers signal aspects of their status or personality. Outdoor gear, for instance, is often worn or used not just for utility in the wilderness but to signal the owner’s affinity for adventure. The cooler brand YETI surged to a leadership position in a previously sleepy category with prominent labeling—offering a strong, consistent visual identity across its products and advertising and a promise of rugged, even overbuilt quality.

One of the greatest brand-building successes in history has been Apple. Although the company’s category, computer hardware, was long associated with office drudgery and introverted users, Apple’s branding made its customers feel creative and unique. The company’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial, announcing the then new Macintosh computer, was perhaps the single most influential advertisement ever aired. Yet the commercial never showed a computer or explained what it could be used for or how it could be purchased. It did not even mention the brand name in the multimillion-dollar commercial until the final five seconds. Instead, it did something more powerful: it defined the brand’s customer as revolutionary and creative.

Brand architecture is the organizing structure of a brand portfolio. Brand managers often use more than one brand for a product and may span a single brand across many products. For example, Coca-Cola originated as a single-product brand, associated for more than a century with a specific carbonated soft drink. But in recent years it spawned several sub-brands, which are distinguished with additional terminology (“Diet,” “Cherry,” “Zero”) and visual cues, such as the silver associated with Diet Coke and the black associated with Coke Zero. Coca-Cola is also not just a consumer brand but a strong corporate brand, used to communicate the company’s track record of financial success to investors and business partners. These multiple uses of the brand help increase the return Coca-Cola gets from investing in a single brand, but they come at a cost to flexibility. The brand manager for Coke Zero, for example, has to consider the potential impact of a new promotion or partnership not just on the Coke Zero brand but on the other products under the Coca-Cola brand umbrella as well as the Coca-Cola corporate brand. By contrast, the brand manager for Sprite (a brand owned by Coca-Cola) has more freedom, since consumers are unlikely to associate advertising messages from Sprite with the Coca-Cola brand.

Brand managers use an array of tactics to organize complex brand architectures, but, broadly speaking, companies follow either a “branded house” or a “house of brands’’ approach. Apple operates mainly as a branded house, with nearly all of its products prominently identified with the “Apple” brand. Individual Apple products are distinguished through product brands (e.g., iPhone, AirPods) but the Apple name, visual style, and language are present in all communications. Consumer packaged-goods companies, on the other hand, typically prefer the house of brands, multiple-branding strategy, as seen with Procter & Gamble (Crest, Gillette, Tide) and Colgate-Palmolive (Softsoap, Tom’s of Maine, Ajax). Variations are common, although companies typically keep brands separate when they convey distinct and even conflicting associations (such as brands for toothpaste and dishwasher detergent) but link them together when their various products benefit from common values (as with digital products like mobile phones and laptops).

For each individual brand within the marketing architecture, brand managers decide how closely to connect them with one another and with the larger corporate brand. Various terms are sometimes used, not necessarily consistently across companies, to denote these relationships. Managers might refer to a brand that is closely linked to its parent as a “sub-brand” (for example, FedEx Ground and FedEx Office), whereas a brand with a more subtle connection might be termed an “endorsed brand” (Courtyard by Marriott). “Ingredient” brands can even operate within another company’s architecture. Intel’s “Intel Inside” campaign helped the company maintain dominance in personal computer chips for decades by adding their product and the Intel branding to goods produced by other companies, such as Dell, Acer, and Lenovo. These marketing approaches are fluid and situational, and most multibrand companies today employ a range of tactics.

At its core, a brand is a name, but nearly all brands are associated with other symbols, including logos, colors, taglines, and music. Over time, these symbols can acquire substantial monetary value and are generally protected through trademark law. Brand managers must be careful to keep control over their brand elements, or trademark protection can be lost. Large brands typically have detailed internal rules about the use of brand imagery, precise colors, and design elements. Ironically, great success in brand marketing can be fatal, leading to genericide: when a brand, due to market saturation, becomes the generic term for the product itself and loses its legal protection. Aspirin, for example, was once a trademark of the Bayer company, and cellophane was formerly a DuPont trademark. Consequently, companies that have built popular brands such as Google, Photoshop, and Kleenex must be careful in communications and with partners to prevent their brands from becoming generic, legally useable terms. 

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Tiffany & Co.’s signature robin’s egg blue bag and box.

© Jeff Whyte/Dreamstime.com

There are also assorted powerful branding tools. The use of sound, for example, has evolved from classic advertising “jingles” (e.g., “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup” for Folgers Coffee) to signature sounds, such as HBO’s “static angel” intro, Netflix’s “ta-dum,” or Intel’s five-note “bong.” A signature colour can also be powerful, because of how widely it can be used—at the point of sale, for product extensions, and in advertising—once the colour is established in the minds of consumers. Examples include Tiffany’s turquoise blue, T-Mobile’s pink, and Home Depot’s orange.

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Actress Drew Barrymore offers the alien some Reese’s Pieces candy, a prominent example of product placement in the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). 

© Universal Studios/Amblin Entertainment

For most brands, though, the primary means of building awareness and associations are through advertising, still a multibillion-dollar industry. In this classic marketing approach, the brand is advertised in a scene or narrative intended to evoke the desired associations. AT&T, for example, has for decades promoted the power of a phone call to bridge the geographical divide, keeping families and loved ones connected. But advertising has progressed beyond obvious commercials, as companies seek to reach consumers in more subtle ways, such as through product placement in films and television programs, affiliation with celebrities and “influencers” (either by using them as spokespersons or by sponsoring their events), and association with admired causes (such as environmentalism or disaster relief). These tactics can generate much greater returns than traditional advertising—in 1982, for example, Hershey paid $1 million to feature a new candy, Reese’s Pieces, in the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and enjoyed a 65 percent increase in sales and a lasting association with a beloved movie character. Today, there are entire advertising agencies devoted to linking brands with movies, social media personalities, and special events.

Sponsorship branding, where a brand is tied to an athlete or entertainer or special occasion or cause, is another popular means of building associations, though this marketing method is fraught with risk. Michael Jordan’s longtime partnership with Nike, for example, has made both parties billions of dollars. On the other hand, Adidas’s lucrative partnership with entertainer Kanye West backfired after he made a series of anti-Semitic remarks, leading the company to cut ties with him in 2022 at an immediate cost to the corporation of some $250 million and the risk of much greater long-term damage to the brand. Social or political associations can similarly be treacherous for brands. In 2023, both Bud Light and Target received backlash and calls for boycotts of their brands after the former engaged a transgender influencer for a promotion of its beer and the latter marketed trans-friendly merchandise during Pride Month. 

Brand-building is not limited to external promotional communications. Brand managers seek to align all aspects of the company and the product with the brand and vice versa. Nike, for example, encourages its employees to pursue athletic hobbies, while Walmart promotes frugality with spartan corporate offices. Branding can even mean deliberately selling less of the product, a classic supply-and-demand tactic known as “scarcity marketing.” Clothing retailer Supreme built its brand on the back of its retail “drops,” new products introduced in limited supply at its own retail locations, which attract long lines in highly visible urban neighborhoods, building associations of exclusivity for the company.

Although brands and branding evolved as a tool for marketing consumer products, brands are relevant in a variety of contexts. Brands can be valuable in business-to-business transactions, where managers often prefer to do business with established brands as a way of protecting themselves and limiting risk. For decades, “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” was a widely used expression, reflecting the associations of reliability and quality that the IBM brand, known as “Big Blue,” had earned in corporate boardrooms. Similarly, consulting firms like McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group implicitly promise their clients, as part of their brand appeal, a “seal of approval.” Managers advocating for a risky corporate venture frequently hire one of these firms to develop the strategy and add their brand strength to the proposal so that it carries more weight with corporate leadership.

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Wearing a MAGA (Make America Great Again) red hat, Donald Trump speaks to supporters at a campaign rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona, March 2016.

Gage Skidmore

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A passerby dropping a donation into the red kettle of Delores Wright, a Salvation Army bell ringer in Chicago, during the 2004 Christmas season.

© Tim Boyle/Getty Images

Less commercial organizations also rely on and invest in their brands. Young people spend years studying to be accepted at universities and then spend years paying off related debt, all for the lifelong right to associate themselves with brands like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cambridge, and Oxford. Modern universities employ many of the same tactics as shoe manufacturers and hamburger chains to enhance and protect their brands. Governments, political parties, artists, and charitable organizations are all active stewards of their brands, and some have developed sophisticated brand systems. Donald Trump’s bright red “Make America Great Again” hats, Livestrong’s yellow bracelets, and the Salvation Army’s red kettle are all iconic brand symbols intended to spur a host of non-commercial associations, from patriotism and political engagement to philanthropy and compassion.

The foundational virtue of a strong brand is pricing power. A well-branded product will sell for more than an otherwise identical generic one. But strong brands have other virtues. They give companies a head start into new product areas and opportunities through brand extensions. Apple’s iPhones, iPods, and AirPods headphones all benefited from the tailwind of the Apple brand. Gmail is trusted by millions of users in part because it comes from Google, a company that was already their main portal to the Internet.

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Testing bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol with a chemically treated paper that turns blue in the presence of cyanide, Chicago, 1982. Such testing followed in the wake of the Tylenol poisoning tragedy that killed seven people in the Chicago area and led to a mass recall of the over-the-counter drug.

John Swart—AP/Shutterstock.com

Strong brands are also moats against incursions by competitors. Dominant brands often “own” the most valuable associations in a category, and challenger brands must either spend prodigious amounts on marketing to compete head-to-head with them or adopt niche positions to carve out a smaller market share. In the U.S., for example, T-Mobile is the second largest wireless carrier, but it came into the market with lesser brand awareness than the leaders, Verizon and AT&T, so it built the T-Mobile brand in express contrast with them, calling itself the “Un-carrier.” Trusted brands are also better suited to survive difficult times. The Tylenol brand survived a terrifying poison scare in 1982 in part because it had been part of consumer’s lives for nearly 30 years. Coca-Cola emerged from a failed attempt to reformulate its core product (“New Coke”) stronger than ever when the controversial change reinvigorated consumers’ lifelong associations with Coca-Cola. Brands without those years of established associations, however, can be more fragile. Soon after Ford introduced the Pinto, the model suffered a series of highly publicized fiery crashes. Lacking the ballast of other associations, the brand became known for those crashes, even though the car (which Ford knew was potentially dangerous) was no more dangerous than many other cars of its era. Ford abandoned the brand name.

Strong brands can even turn consumers into brand ambassadors. A popular metric for measuring brand strength is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which relies on a single question: “How likely are you to recommend this product to someone else?” A brand that people are proud to be associated with is one that people are more likely to recommend and promote, for example, through social media.

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Grocery store boxes of Aunt Jemima pancake mix in June 2020, shortly before the brand was discontinued because of charges of racial stereotyping in the wake of the murder that summer of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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A runway model for the Guy Laroche fashion house in Paris, France, in 2006, whose extremely thin physique in the opinion of many promoted an unhealthy body image.

© Abaca Press/Alamy

Branding has its critics. Some argue that the increased price charged for branded products is exploitative, a means of using the power of mass media to manipulate people into wasteful spending. Specific brands, products, and advertising campaigns have also been charged with promoting harmful stereotypes, unhealthy pastimes, and unattainable ideals. Products such as Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Uncle Ben’s rice, and Cream of Wheat have all discontinued their historic brands or logos depicting African Americans because they have been charged with racial stereotyping; the fashion industry has frequently been singled out for promoting unhealthy body types; and advertising tied to smoking, especially when apparently aimed at children (as the manufacturers of vaping products are widely accused of doing), has long been criticized for encouraging a dangerous addiction. Additionally, because advertising is often the primary source of funding for news and entertainment content, critics warn that advertisers may actually be purchasing biased treatment and reviews of their products. “Greenwashing” refers to companies using advertising and brand associations to counter the environmental and human harms their products or services may have caused. Major international oil companies, for example, have all faced controversies over using advertising to change consumer perceptions. In 2001 BP began promoting itself as “Beyond Petroleum” (the firm’s initials historically stood for “British Petroleum”) despite the fact that it produced billions of barrels of oil and gas per year. Less than a decade later, it abandoned the campaign after it sold its solar and wind divisions in order to cover losses stemming from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The worldwide use of the Internet has spurred the most profound change to brand strategy since the rise of mass media in the 20th century. At their core, brands are a means of communication, one historically controlled by the manufacturer and owner of the brand. In a digital marketplace, however, consumers have great access to information and a global audience as well as novel means and tools for publishing their thoughts. As a consequence, brand owners have much less control over the ways their brands are used, viewed, and critiqued. A traditional television commercial or magazine advertisement, for example, is a self-contained, unalterable experience. Online, however, consumers or critics can use brand assets in unexpected ways, often subverting the brand owner’s mission and message. Parody accounts on social media, for instance, can associate unflattering messages with apparently legitimate brand imagery. Even a brand’s own website or social media channel can become a forum for criticism and competitive voices. In 2022, after Twitter relaxed the requirements to obtain a “blue check” that indicates a legitimate account, pranksters made accounts in the name of various corporations and tweeted messages associating, for example, Eli Lilly with price gouging for insulin, Chiquita with Latin American dictatorships, and Tesla with automobile crashes.

Because the Internet delivers news and data directly to consumers, buyers are also less reliant now on brands to convey information about a particular product or service. Before the Internet, for instance, a business traveler headed to a new city likely would have booked a room at a familiar branded hotel, such as the Hilton or Ritz-Carlton. Now, in just a few minutes, travelers can identify boutique options more akin to their likes, closer to their destination, and otherwise more valuable to them in distinct ways. The value of a brand as a signifier of quality has lessened in the online age.

While traditional product brands have often stumbled in adapting to the digital age, those surviving have conformed nonetheless and incorporated online messaging into their strategies. Native digital brands, meanwhile, have become some of the most popular, valuable, and admired ones in the world: Google, Amazon, and PayPal, for example, all rely on their strong brands to garner consumer trust and attention in the online marketplace.