What's Your BRAND?

Companies spend millions and billions of dollars developing their BRAND. According to Wikipedia, Brand is defined as a symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to a company,product or service. A brand serves to create associations and expectations among products made by a producer. A brand often includes an explicit logo, fonts, color schemes, symbols and sound which may be developed to represent implicit values, ideas, and even personality. The key objective is to create a relationship of trust.

Just last month, Best Global Brands announced their top 100 Best Global Brands with Coca Cola being named number 1 for the eighth consecutive year in a row. Their estimated brand value in 2008 was roughly $66,667,000,000 based on their brand alone. Conversely, the 100th listed brand suprisingly was Visa with an estimated brand value of $3,338,000,000. Both companies have went to extreme lengths in developing their brand with expensive and strategically placed marketing campaigns. Visa's most recent advertising campaign dubbed "Priceless" is a great case in point.

The importance of building brand is everywhere. In doing a MSN Search, the word BRAND had 311,000,000 web hits. So what's your brand????