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What is a brand? Too often even marketing professionals don't have an answer, and too many have
their 'own' answer. Which makes life very confusing! We've trawled through our resources to find
some of the best definitions:

The Dictionary of Business and Management defines a brand as:

"

  used to identify items or services of the seller(s) and to differentiate them
from goods of competitors."

Signs and symbols are part of what a brand is, but to us this is a very incomplete definition.

Walter Landor, one of the greats of the advertising industry, said:

"simply put,

 
. By identifying and authenticating a product or service it delivers a
pledge of satisfaction and quality."

In his book, 'Building Strong Brands' David Aaker suggests the brand is a '
' and gives a
definition of brand equity as:

"

(or liabilities) linked to a brand's name and symbol that adds to (or subtracts from)
the value provided by a product or service..."

This is an important point, brands are not necessarily positive!

Building from this idea of a 'mental box' a more poetic definition might be:

"A brand is the most valuable real-estate in the world, a corner of the consumer's mind".

These are all great definitions, but we believe the best is this:


 
   

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As we have argued in our other revision notes on branding, it is the ´added valueµ or augmented
elements that determine a brand·s positioning in the market place.

Positioning can be defined as follows:

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Brands can be positioned against competing brands on a  



A perceptual map defines the market in terms of the way buyers perceive key characteristics of
competing products.

The basic perceptual map that buyers use maps products in terms of their price and quality, as
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