Strategic Brand Management : A Process of Growing and Strengthening Brands

A brand is the identity of a specific product service or business. A brand can take many forms including a name sign, symbol, colour combination or slogan. The word branding began simply as a way to tell one person\'s cattle from another by means of a hot iron stamp. The brand name is quite often used interchangeably with brand although it is more correctly used to specifically denote written or spoken linguistic elements of any product.

Almost every business has a trading name, from the smallest market trader to the largest multi-national corporation. Only a minority of those businesses however, have what could be classed as a brand or a brand name. Branding is a word commonly referred to by advertisers and marketing people, but what does it actually mean, how can you get it, and most importantly, how can you get it, and most importantly how will it benefit your business. There are many different definitions of a brand the most effective description however is that a brand is a name or symbol that is commonly known to identify a company or its products and separate them from the competition. (jacket)