For anyone new to brands, trying to grasp what branding is all about must be a complex task. Even more so if you are looking for straight answers. But considering that branding enjoyed a huge amount of interest during the 1990's, hopefully most people who are even remotely interested in brands have grasped that a brand is more than a logo. But then what exactly is a brand?

There are countless definitions for this term; a promise, a guarantee, a relationship, an image, a unique position and so forth. But these descriptions are all results of branding, not the brand itself. A better description is "a person's collected experiences of a company, product or service with a certain name."

A Brand is Actually a Memory

Everything a customer/ client remembers about a company, is usually through interaction, through what other people say about them, through advertising and past experiences of their products. These processes of different interactions are actually their branding proposition for the customer.

Say that if a person particularly like a certain kind of car, sports equipment or maybe even a particular kind of high end luxury good. The customer might like the way they look in it , they think they look good in that kind of car, or in that sports apparel they are wearing and if it does not break down or spoils easily and they think the overall quality is good, that would be a strong brand for them. But let's imagine that they, God forbid, lose their memory through amnesia. Then they wouldn't have a clue about what kind of car, sports equipment etc that they like.

The Brand as a Memory

By constructing a brand as a memory you get a better tool for managing your brand. The clever thing is that you actually start at the end. In order to be able to manage your brand over time you construct a Brand Memory Identity. This is a description of the ideal memory your customer should have of your brand. This is someone who wouldn't imagine buying anything else other than your brand, he preaches your excellence to everyone he knows, and is prepared to pay a little extra for your brand. That's what all customers should be like, right?

Therefore you have to always ask yourself and your company, what does your customer need to experience to get the kind of brand memory that you would like him to have?