The concept of branding applies to any individual, organization, product, or service, as long as there is a transaction between human beings. Branding relies on fundamental principles of psycho-sociology – essentially the way our memory processes, stores, and recalls information. Not to actively manage one’s brand name is therefore the equivalent of putting one’s head in the sand and wishing for the best.

Many law firms, for example, assume that branding would negatively impact their reputation. However, branding should not be confused with television commercials. Whereas relationships and quality work are still fundamental to the success of a law firm, brand management can help a law firm in many ways, including (1) making clients more loyal to the firm as a whole than to specific professionals within the firm; (2) communicating a focused message to attract new clients, who increasingly shop around for razor-sharp legal expertise; (3) retain talent and attract bright new graduates, for whom the reputation of a firm is often an important non-cash factor.

There are branding steps that can have a considerable impact on revenues without the need for big budgets, such as the brand positioning strategy, the naming of the product, the packaging design, the delivery process of a service, the consistency of the brand experience at each contact-point with the customer, to mention a few.

Naming is a subset of branding. Any combination of sounds, or phonemes, can compose a name, and perhaps be unique enough as to identify a product or service without ambiguity. But that is not enough to make it a brand.

For internal purposes, engineers or designers often use code names to identify their projects, such as PN96. To become a brand, however, a name has to be able to fit in its audience’s memory in a way that will make the brand’s attributes recalled. Thus, “PN96″ turns out to be the best selling vehicle in the US, the F150 truck, “Built Ford Tough.”

Nevertheless, naming is a critical step of branding, and it would be a missed opportunity to leave it to Tarzan or the CEO’s spouse. Deprived of access to the Brandchannel, Tarzan sought common nouns from his limited vocabulary to name his adopted son and quickly ended up with “Boy.” Little he knew! If new parents cringe at the idea of getting the new name past their mothers-in-law, brand managers have to deal with a long battery of naming tests (and eventually the CEO’s mother-in-law). On the bright side, a well-chosen name can be so powerful as to become a one-word commercial. It is especially critical for small businesses, which often lack of the necessary marketing budgets to promote their brand effectively.

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.