All those names – competing for attention and brain share – keep piling up into a considerable number. Some authors claim that about 10,000 new brands are created every day. Whatever the right number is, it’s a disproportionately high population compared with the tiny number of great brands. The management of most companies tends to believe that their brand is great.

The ultimate metrics to define a great brand can be seen on the skin of its audience. There are cool brands such as Nike, Sony, Nintendo and Xbox that epitomize greatness without burning the skin of their fans. How can we then define the essence of such greatness?

The essence of greatness is in the capacity of a brand to foster the sales of a product/service by creating an emotional link with its audience. As such, a great brand balances the delivery of functional benefits with emotional ones.

In practice, you could ask yourself the following questions: Does my brand have any substantial positive impact on sales and market share (If market share is difficult to assess, consider your sales level against industry averages or against the estimated sales of your main competitors)? Does my brand hook our customer-base and make them loyal to the company?

Building a great brand is therefore serious business, albeit a blend of art and science. Whatever your brand and its specific situation, the path to greatness remains the same and is almost entirely based on the way the brain stores, recalls, and processes memories. Considerable progress has been made in the last 15 years in this research field, to the great benefit of marketing and branding.

In a nutshell, great branding starts with a rigorous assessment of your audience and of the brand positioning in the minds of those people. What beliefs pop up in their mind when they think about your brand and its category? What are the good and bad memories coming back to mind? In the case of a car make, for instance, people may remember that this was the automobile of their first kiss, but they may as well remember a tire recall. In the case of a law firm, memory may associate with a painful divorce and broken family, for example. As it transpires, a brand interferes with a considerable level of noise in the collective memory of its audience.