Ultimate definition of branding is that "a brand is a promise" the process of branding is building promises!

Brands are not logos, they are not ads in magazines or billboards and they are not names. Brands aren't supposed to communicate a message but rather they try to keep a consistent voice. Brands are also not suppose to persuade, that's the job of advertising, but rather try to sympathize, connect, and help.

Brand is a promise!

Foundations of Branding

Most branding projects when they begin, they already have a name, they also have productions associated with it and some are already established companies. However, in general the first that needs to be done in branding is to try to position a brand.

Brand positioning had only 4 parts, 4 questions that need to be answered precisely!

1. Who is the brand for?
2. What is the brand one of?
3. Why is the brand better than other ones?
4. *Why should people believe in the brand promise?

Who is the brand for?

Basically it’s the target market. The misconception among many business startups or bad marketers is that the larger the target market the better the brand will do, WRONG!!, in reality the broader the target market the easier the brand promise will miss its mark. What you want to have is a target market big enough so that the business would make sense.

almost every web project i get these days, the owners want to capture the entire internet, they all assume if people give it a chance they would be able to live without it, in other word everybody is going to love their product so why should they limit their product's success by narrowing the target market. The answer is simple, no 2 people are alike, if you love something i might hate it, and since we are all so different we want different things and we value different things. So the logical process is to research the market and figure out what a group of people have most in common, the more things they have in common the better we can angel the promise to cater to their needs and wants.

Getting the target market right is critical to the entire process, if you don't have a clear target market, or have doubts that the target mark would like what you have you might as well not proceed to the next questions. NO TARGET MARKET, NO BRAND SUCSESS!

What is the brand one of?

Competition, you need to know who you're competing with before you can try to penetrate the market. Also knowing who you're competition is will allow you to position yourselves above them both from value offering and product quality. The biggest trick in branding is to attack the industry from an outsider point of view. An industry outsider gets to view the whole field and is not easily intimidated to the mambo jumbo that the insiders have to put up with everyday.

Just knowing the competition is not enough, you have to research the A-Z of competition from the products they have, the way they sell and distribute, advertising method, other brands positioning, value offerings, future innovations and etc. Do a great job in identifying your competition and all of a sudden coming out with a great brand positioning is relatively easy!

Why is the brand better than other ones?

Your brand has to have something that would make it sellable. If you have a product that 3 other companies have then it comes down to some simple things like inventing a whole new target market, but if you have a product that no one has or it's a better version of all other similar products then there are 3 things your brand and product should be

• Technical
  
• Functional
  
• Emotional

Why should people believe in the brand promise?

Every brand just like every human being needs to have a soul. The soul of a brand is its personality, characteristics, intelligence and charm.  Creating a personality for a brand is a science all by itself, my prime example is Apple, and other ones might be Google or Ferrari. These are some of the brands we see as having a personality, you don't see a huge corporation behind but as something else, you somehow want to trust these companies. On the other hand take Microsoft or GM or most of the Bank Brands, they have no soul, we always see them as big corporations that control things, it is really easy to hate these companies.

Some great sites that have a lot of branding articles and have great resources about branding:

Interbrand | SagePub | Branding Strategy Insider | Other Great Articles