Branding is the foundation of marketing and is inseparable from business strategy. It is therefore more than putting a label on a fancy product. Nowadays, a corporation, law firm, country, university, museum, hospital, celebrity, and even you in your career can be considered as a brand.

As such, a brand is a combination of attributes, communicated through a name, or a symbol, that influences a thought-process in the mind of an audience and creates value. As branding is deeply anchored in psycho-sociology, it takes into account both functional and emotional benefits. Therefore, those attributes compose the beliefs that the brand’s audience recalls when they think about the brand in its context.

The value of a brand resides, for the audience, in the promise that the product or service will deliver. Clearly, a brand can recall memories of a bad experience. The value for the audience then would be to avoid purchasing that brand.

In conclusion, branding is the blend of art and science that manages associations between a brand and memories in the mind of the brand’s audience. It involves focusing resources on selected tangible and intangible attributes to differentiate the brand in an attractive, meaningful and compelling way for the targeted audience. Brand management then becomes the organizational framework that systematically manages those customer-centric processes. It aims at gathering intelligence, allocating resources, and consistently delivering the brand promise over time at each contact-point with the customer.

Ad agencies deal with passive approaches. Their clients don’t have to click on this or that to explore. They have one shot to get their message across. there will always be a place for those TV spots and print campaigns but in today’s marketing world it’s simply the jam and not the bread of a complete package.

Web agencies deal with a very interactive audience. Even the simplest web sites require for the viewer to point and click to get there. The world has become much more interactive. The mass majority of consumers has already researched a product before buying. If a company’s web site crashes their computer or takes forever to load they get bored and select the next one from their search list.

Instead of listening across the clothesline about who makes the best product consumers are turning to blogs to see who has what and how well designed that product is. Gone is the day where consumers bought products on blind faith. Today’s consumer is well informed and wants to be treated as such.

While advertising agencies and PR firms are very talented they are not web designers. The web sites that come out of the advertising firms are often poorly formatted. Web agencies deal the problems of formatting and accessibility. Coding. The designers can come up with the next greatest innovation but if the coders can’t find the right web language then the site will fail. Coding has taken on a new dimension for the web. Prior to the rise of web marketing campaigns code languages although complex didn’t have to deal with the types of media that are now being requested of them. Everything in the web coding world is changing at a rapid pace. Within a web agencies the front end and the back end have to work together to produce a reliable product that doesn’t crash a consumers computer. Even if that consumer has a computer from the stone age.