Like any complex and capacious concept, brand cannot have a single universal definition that most scholars and practitioners in the field can agree on. Moreover, the concept of brand does not stand still, but is constantly evolving, absorbing new knowledge and changing in the course of social development.

If you ask several people involved in brand management to describe the main characteristics of a brand, the result will be completely different formulations. And this does not mean that any definitions are wrong, but rather that these experts look at the term from different angles.

In simple words, a brand is a grouped list of concepts, unique solutions, feelings of perception, values associated with a product or service of a particular organization. That is, a personal brand can be called a mental shell of a product.

For centuries, the practice of marking goods with certain brands has persisted. During the rapid development of industry, at the turn of the XVII-XIX centuries, with the advent of mass-produced goods it became appropriate to mark the goods, print words and trademarks on them.

The end of the XIX century is considered the “golden age” of brand creation, it was then that many of the now most famous brands were created: Coca-Cola, American Express, Heineken and many others. It was then that the term “brand” entered business speech.

The American Marketing Association (AMA) gives the following definition: A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other characteristic that identifies a seller’s product or service as different from those of other sellers.

Not all scholars and practitioners share the AMA’s approach of differentiation based on product properties and viewing brand solely from the seller’s perspective. They view brand as more than the sum of a product’s unique physical characteristics, adding words such as:

• image;
• emotions;
• associations;
• reputation;
• recognizability.