Brands and Branding

Brand is a name, term, symbol or design used to differentiate one seller’s goods from a competitor’s. A brand is essentially a seller’s promise to consistently deliver a specific set of features, benefits, and services to the buyers. The best brands convey a warranty of quality. In essence, a brand identifies the seller or maker.
Branding means the use of a name, term, symbol, or design, or a combination of these, to identify a product. It includes the use of brand names, trademarks, and partically all other means of product identification. Perhaps the most distinctive skill of professional marketers is their ability to create, maintain, protect, and enchance brands, marketers say that “branding is the art and cornerstone of merketing.”
Branding poses several challenges to the marketer.There are 5 challenges in branding.
The first is Branding – decision: To brand or not to brand? The first decision is whether the company should develop a brand name for its product. In the past, most products were unbranded. But today branding is such as strong force that hardly anything goes unbranded. Salt is packaged in distinctive manufacturers’ containers, oranges are stamped with growers’ names, common nuts and bolts are packaged in cellophane with a distributors’ label and so on. …