Brands have a number of useful commercial purposes. They can build margins, gain distribution, provide a base for expansion, and a whole lot more, but that is all from the perspective of the brand owner.

From the opposite perspective, that of the customer, and potential customer, a brand also has a whole lot of purposes, none of which have anything at all to do directly with your prosperity.

A brand is the end result of all the impressions and emotions individuals have experienced while coming into contact with the thing to which the ‘brand’ is attached.

Our individual responses will be marginally different, but as a group, we label those collective experiences  a ‘brand’

Our brains are just massively complex parallel computers, something the boffins in Silicon Valley are trying valiantly to replicate.  In effect, we absorb and process all sorts of things at the one time, mashing them all up to something that gets ‘remembered’ and which our brains can retrieve automatically when presented with the ‘trigger’

This is a combination of rational and emotional inputs that has its roots in evolutionary biology.  It enables all the things going on around us to be sorted quickly and efficiently without resorting to consciously making a series of choices. This applies as much to the choice of yogurt on the supermarket shelf as it does to the rustle in the bushes that last time resulted in your sidekick caveman being a tigers breakfast. You do not forget that, but at the critical point, when you hear the rustle again, your brain registers the rustle, and auto responses kicks in, and you get the hell out of Dodge.

There is a lot of bullshit and hyperbole around the notion of ‘brand’. However, like many things in life, we complicate it past the point of common sense. The challenge then is to dig sufficiently deeply to understand and articulate the trigger/response mechanism in the minds of those we most want to influence.

It sounds a bit creepy, but is just the way we respond to our environment.