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A brand is name, term, design, symbol, or other feature that distinguishes products and services from competitive offerings, as defined by the American Marketing Association; however, according to The Chartered Institute of Marketing, a brand represents the consumers' experience with an organization, product, or service.

History

In the field of marketing, brands originated in the nineteenth century with the advent of packaged goods. According to Unilever records, Pears Soap was the world's first registered commercial brand. Industrialization moved the production of household items, such as soap, from local communities to centralized factories. When shipping their items, the factories would brand their logotype insignia on the shipping barrels. These factories, generating mass-produced goods, needed to sell their products to a wider range of customers, to a customer base familiar only with local goods, and it turned out that a generic package of soap had difficulty competing with familiar, local products.

The fortunes of many of that era's brands, such as Uncle Ben's rice and Kellogg's breakfast cereal, illustrate the problem. The packaged goods manufacturers needed to convince buyers that they could trust in the non-local, factory product. Campbell soup, Coca-Cola, Juicy Fruit gum, Aunt Jemima, and Quaker Oats, were the first American products to be branded to increase the customer's familiarity with the products.

Around 1900, James Walter Thompson published a house advert explaining trademark advertising, in an early commercial description of what now is known as 'branding'. Soon, companies adopted slogans, mascots, and jingles that were heard on radio and seen in early television. By the 1940s, Mildred Pierce manufacturers recognized how customers were developing relationships with their brands in the social, psychological, and anthropological senses. From that, manufacturers quickly learned to associate other kinds of brand values, such as youthfulness, fun, and luxury, with their products. Thus began the practice of 'branding', wherein the customer buys the brand rather than the product. This trend arose in the 1980s 'brand equity mania'. In 1988, when Phillip Morris bought Kraft for six times its paper worth, because the Phillip Morris company was actually buying the Kraft brand rather than the company and its products.

April 2, 1993, labelled Marlboro Friday, was the death day of the brand. On that day, Phillip Morris declared a 20 per cent price cut of Marlboro cigarettes in order to compete with cheaper price cigarettes. At the time, Marlboro cigarettes were notorious for their heavy advertising campaigns, and nuanced brand image. On that day, the prices of many branded companies Wall street stocks fell: Heinz, Coca Cola, Quaker Oats, PepsiCo; seemingly the signal of the beginning 'brand blindness'(Klein 13).

Read more at Wikipedia.org