What is a Brand?

A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or company. ...an aura, an invisible layer of meaning that surrounds the product. (Neumeier, 2006)
According to Neumeier (2006), the brand is defined by individuals but not companies, markets or general public. It is each single person that is generating their own personal opinion of some conception. And only after a greater number of people arrive at the same feeling about some particular conception, a company can be said to have a brand.
Companies cannot fully control this process of psychological perception in people's minds, however they can influence it by communicating specific visions, ideas, qualities of the products and/or company itself.

A brand is not what you say it is. It's what THEY say it is (Neumeier, 2006)

A famous founder of an advertising agency, David Ogilvy, describes a brand as 'the intangible sum of a product's attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation and the way it's advertised'.

According to Persuasive Brands website (2011), any brand is a set of perceptions and images that represent a company, product or service. While many people refer to a brand as a logo, tag line or audio jingle, a brand is actually much larger. A brand is the essence or promise of what will be delivered or experienced.

Importantly, brands enable a buyer to easily identify the offerings of a particular company. Brands are generally developed over time through:

• Advertisements containing consistent messaging
• Recommendations from friends, family members or colleagues
• Interactions with a company and its representatives
• Real-life experiences using a product or service (generally considered the most important element of establishing a brand)

Once developed, brands provide an umbrella under which many different products can be offered--providing a company tremendous economic leverage and strategic advantage in generating awareness of their offerings in the marketplace. 

As Wally Olins (2008) pointed out, a brand on its early stage is referred to consumer goods, their names and logos, one may see on the shelves of supermarkets. On the second level the supermarkets and stores in which these branded products are sold have become brands themselves (for example: Tesco and Waitrose are very distinct brands). Another cluster of brand perception is referred to luxury goods, where a huge percentage of excessive price is due to their specific brand promotion allusion. For some people brand is just a sign, a symbol, a logo, a website or a piece of paper, without the realisation of the people and processes that stand behind it. Even countries are branded in their own way by transforming their specific cultural and traditional differences into one vision and image and communicating it globally by means of music, flags, clothing, languages, and other representations.

A brand represents a promise that a company will deliver, therefore it is one of the most important aspects for the business.

Branding is the process of forming an emotional attachment between the brand itself and consumer

A brand is the DNA of the company, it should live and breather through everything the company does (through Gossain, S, 2011).

Brands are the company's most valuable assets (through Gossain, S, 2011).