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Branding Iron

March 10th, 2010 admin No comments

Branding Iron

A Brief History of Branding

The word brand originally meant anything hot or burning, and for hundreds of years was associated with the process of marking an animal with a unique symbol so that the owner could identify it at a later date. The practice involved heating a branding iron that was fashioned into a symbol, letter or name, in a fire, which would then be pressed against the hide of an animal, burning the hair and skin and leaving a permanent scar on the body.

The term brand now has a wider meaning, and is used to describe a name, logo or slogan associated with a particular company, product or service. Brands came about as a way to identity a companies' products from similar products of rival businesses, but of course branding could also be used to disguise an inferior product as one of higher quality; in ancient China, merchants sometimes used branding to falsely pass off lower grade garden tea as higher grade hill tea, by using names such as "Misty Mountain Tea", or "Garden in the Sky Tea".

A brand is all about how a customer perceives a product or company. A successful brand is recognisable and creates an instant association with a product or service. For example, people see a McDonald’s Restaurant, and they know they can get quick and cheap food there. Building a brand can take a long time and is a combination of a having a consistent product, as well as strong advertising and marketing.

The highest level of achievement in the world of branding is to create a brand that is instantly recognisable even without the name of the company present. This takes years of marketing and huge amounts of investment; companies that have achieved this include Nike (with its "swoosh"), McDonald’s (with its Golden Arches), Playboy (with the Playboy Bunny) and several car manufacturers such as Mercedes, Jaguar and Mitsubishi.

These days, companies spend thousands of pounds building and promoting their brands, keeping up on the latest media news and advancements. A company's brand is vital to its success and therefore it's imperative that a company monitors its brand image to ensure that it is being perceived in the way it wants to be.

Negative press relating to a particular brand can have extremely detrimental effects and can mean that the public associate a brand with negative aspects, which is obviously bad for business, and a damaged brand can take months or even years to recover, if it ever recovers at all.

About the Author

Andrew Regan is an online, freelance author from Scotland. He is a keen rugby player and enjoys travelling.