Author of Brand Aid: An Easy Reference Guide to Solving Your Toughest Branding Problems and Strengthening Your Market, Brad Vanauken, points out 15 most important things to take care of in building a winning brand:

1. Brands are Personifications of Organizations, Products, Services and Experiences
In this way, they are the primary sources of relationships with customers, promises to customers and customer loyalty.

2. Top Management Support is Crucial
The toughest obstacles that brand champions have encountered in creating brand building organizations, three of the top nine involve the lack of top management support.

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Even if it’s 4 year old In a article published on darwinmag.com, it’s still actual through the subjects discussed by four branding specialists.

Ten years ago, the average person thought of branding as that creative thing you do with the name of a product.Or it meant designing a new wrapper. Or maybe it was the print or television advertising that relayed the brand message.

Today, [tag]branding[/tag] is everything—and I mean everything. Brands are not simply products or services. Brands are the sum total of all the images that people have in their heads about a particular company and a particular mark.

Branding has become a religion in most corporations, and it’s very hard to dislodge it, because people believe that the brand itself is something that changes consumer behavior. We tend to think that branding comes first and the company’s success follows. In fact, when you look at most businesses, the products came first.

Historically, a brand has been a promise that says, “If you buy this product or buy from my company, you can rely on me because of the attributes attached to the brand.” We’re going to see a new kind of branding emerge, a much more customer-centric branding where the promise is, “I know you as an individual customer better than anyone else, and you can trust me to assemble the right products or services to meet your individual needs.”

Most people, when they hear the word branding, think logos – but in fact, branding is really much more than that. A brand involves blending the image, purpose, and focus of your business, with your core marketing message, and coming up with something which will stick in the minds of people who encounter it. As a business or an independent professional, it is who you are and what you do, packaged neatly, clearly, and memorably. A [tag]logo[/tag] is only a tangible representation that works to reinforce a brand.

So – what kind of personality does your business have? Is it conservative and solid? Outgoing and fun? Or robust and strong? And, what is your business focused on doing? Whom do you want to work with? How does your business differ from the competition? And what makes it so special, after all? Do not try to name every special quality or unique selling point – you can actually build a brand on just one unique quality! Once you can answer these questions, you can begin to create your brand. The question is what you want YOUR brand to leave behind in people’s heads.

More about How to Create a Brand that Sticks

Branding: yes, you need a brand.
First, branding is a key defense against commoditization – a situation in which a company’s products and services become perceived by buyers as being interchangeable with those of other companies, so buying decisions become driven by price. With the trend toward instantly and globally searchable competition across all product and service categories, the pull toward commoditization is now an elemental force in marketing. The value of branding – intelligent, relevant, branding that effectively differentiates you from your competition – has never been higher.

Branding will not create a spike in cash flow or market share.
Quite the opposite in fact: it costs time and money to build brand equity whether you’re launching a new brand or re-launching an old one.

If you’re [tag]rebranding[/tag], by the time you’ve spent enough time and money on advertising and marketing, the conditions that triggered your quest to rebrand will have changed. Rebranding as reflex action to stem losses in market share is stupid.

At a certain point, sales is branding: the more sales you have, the more market share you have, the more people see and hear of you, and the more they will think of you. Without sales and market share, branding accomplishes nothing.

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Over at Entrepreneur.com there is a short introductory tutorial on branding and how to start-up the branding process:

Defining your brand is like a journey of business self-discovery. It can be difficult, time-consuming and uncomfortable. It requires, at the very least, that you answer the questions below:

• What is your company’s mission?
• What are the benefits and features of your products or services?
• What do your customers and prospects already think of your company?
• What qualities do you want them to associate with your company?

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When the New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg asked Sen. John Kerry whether the Democrats had a credibility problem on defense controversies, the party’s titular leader replied without equivocation, “Look, the answer is, we have to do an unbranding.” As Kerry saw it, the political problem had to do with salesmanship: “We have to brand more effectively. It’s marketing.” An editor on the linguistic qui vive titled Goldberg’s article about the Democrats’ need to shuck off the appearance of weakness “The Unbranding.”

The hot word in the field of sales — indeed, pervading the world of perfect pitching — is brand.

In a world where the words new and fresh are relentlessly repeated on every product label, the name of the sales technique is getting old and stale. Where is the ad-Ubermensch, the creative Ogilvy, who will put forward a new moniker for the name of the atmospheric marketing game? The time has come, as John Kerry puts it, to unbrand the word brand.

Via Houston Cronicle

MediaPost and Deutsche Bank surveyed advertising executives regarding their online budgets. The results of the survey are published on MediaPost Web site. 35% of budgets dedicated to online branding went to niche sites such as iVillage and Marketwatch. 21% went to the three largest portals, with [tag]Yahoo![/tag] capturing 11%, as much as MSN and America Online combined (MSN had 6% and America Online had 5%). 13% went to Web sites of local media, while 11% went to ad networks. The remaining 20% went to various other sites, including Web sites of local media.

69% of respondents also reported spending more to buy sponsored listings on search engines. 35% of executives said cost-per-click had increased between 1 and 10%, while 25% reported a price increase of 11 to 20%; 9% of respondents said paid search was now at least 21% more expensive than in Q4 2004. Google accounting for 53% of search budgets and Overture accounting for 28%. 4% of search dollars went to Findwhat and 4% went to MSN.

Companies spend billions searching for memorable slogans, but the payoff is elusive and other key aspects of business may be neglected. Today, however, memorable slogans are the exception, not the rule. Slogans aren’t magic, and in most cases consumers don’t pay that much attention to them anyway. Companies that focus too much on slogans end up neglecting the truly important aspects of their businesses.

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Brands are not a passing phenomenon, nor are they something to be left to amateurs, or those who have newly jumped on the ‘brandwagon’. These 10 Insights and Opportunities are what are occupying the minds of captains of industry, branders and marketers around the world

1: Clarity
In an over-communicated world, lack of clarity will substantially reduce effectiveness and efficiency; and complex brand and sub-brand structures without a real audience rationale will reduce this still further.
Opportunity
Torture test your brand positioning

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