Brand

The brand is typically understood as the cultural and emotional domain of a commercial product, or the cultural expression of a company or corporation (and increasingly of traditionally noncommercial entities, such as religious and nonprofit organizations). The brand is the recognizable, regularized, and standardized “message” of a company, the result of a complex “branding strategy” (often called marketing). The success of a brand often depends on its stability, and ability to maintain over time a coherent narrative and recognizable expression. In more economic terms, the brand is a way for a company or corporation to distinguish itself from the competition, a way of standing out in a clutter of advertising, marketing, and products. In the contemporary cultural context, branding is not limited to products, but ideologies, feelings, and the self are also branded (Banet-Weiser 2012).