How to Define “Brand”

Your brand is everything you do. If you are not intentional in defining your brand, the market will define it for you.

Here are a few definitions of the word “brand”.

• A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or organisation.
  
  
• A brand is a person’s gut feeling, because brands are defined by individuals – not companies or markets.
  
  
• A brand  is a gut feeling because people are emotional, intuitive beings.
  
  
• A brand  is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.
  
  
• “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” – Seth Godin
  
  
• “A brand is emotional shorthand for accumulated or assumed information. A brand is present when the value of what a product, service or personality means to its audience is greater than what it does for the audience.” – Austin McGhee

All of these definitions are accurate, but they’re all just a bit different. Defining the generic word “brand” is very difficult.

Defining your own brand can be even more daunting. However, your brand is everything you do. Every word of every sentence of web copy, every social media post, every image, every photograph you share, every video, infographic, podcast, blog, guest blog, article, comment, tweet and reply. Everything!

SOURCE: General Assembly