| A brand (also a trade mark) is a term in marketing, the symbolic presentation of complex information, related to a particular product or service. Generally it includes the name, logo and other visual elements (characters, colored figures and symbols).
Previously the term “brand” (“brand-name”) meant not any trade mark, but only widely popular one. Nowadays it is used as a synonym for the term “trade mark”.
Other synonyms: mark, trade mark.
It is important to distinguish the legal and psychological approach to understand the brand. From the legal point of view, only the trade mark is taken into consideration, designating the manufacturer of the product and that its rights are protected. From the point of view of consumer psychology the discussion is about the brand as information, retained in the memory of consumers.
The purpose of promotion is to create a monopoly in a given market segment. For example, many firms sell aerated water, but only Coca-Cola can sell coca-cola. In this way the working of antimonopoly regulators is dealt indirectly.
The people have a lot of expectations associated with a product or service, from a globally popular trade mark. Business Week regularly publishes the worth of the 100 top brands, which are determined together with the company Interbrand.
The top three brands (from 2002 to 2007, each worth more than 50 billion dollars) are - Coca-Cola, Google and Microsoft.
Starting from the year 2005 the company Interbrand publishes the list of top Russian brands. The top three in the year 2006 (worth more than 1 billion dollars) were Beeline, MTC and Baltika. Interestingly, that the brands like “Gazprom” or “Sberbank” were rated below the brand like “Baltika”. Obviously, these brands don’t induce unique and positive associations in the consumers.
Brands are the object of purchase and sale.
There are two types of notions “brand valuation” and “brand evaluation”.
Brand valuation is the value of brand.
Brand evaluation is the worth of brand.
Similarly, many other notions, like brand capital, the power of the brand etc are used. It is important to differentiate the psychological worth or power of the brand (this is “capital in the brains”) and the financial worth of the brand which is the rating for discounted future monetary flows, being generated by the brand for the firm.
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With so many imitating brands coming from the East, it's easy to have brand confusion. In a recent case a company imitating Polo Ralph Lauren brand sold thousands of handbags to customers who thought they were buying the original Polo bags. At a close inspection handbags read "Polo Marco Hiuui", even though the words Marco Hiuui are printed in small font, while "Polo" and a look-alike logo are printed in large size.
