Designroom Visual Communications Ltd

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Products Are Instantly Meaningful but Brands Become Meaningful over Time.

When you launch a new product, it’s easy to make that product instantly meaningful and useful to consumers because it serves a specific function for them. However, a brand is meaningless until consumers have a chance to experience it, build trust with it, and believe in it. That’s why the 3 steps to brand building include consistency, persistence, and restraint. It takes time and effort to convince consumers to believe in your brand.

The brand name is quite often used interchangeably with "brand", although it is more correctly used to specifically denote written or spoken linguistic elements of any product. In this context a "brand name" constitutes a type of trademark, if the brand name exclusively identifies the brand owner as the commercial source of products or services. A brand owner may seek to protect proprietary rights in relation to a brand name through trademark registration and such trademarks are called "Registered Trademarks".

Products Can Become Obsolete but Brands Can Be Timeless

With the introduction of DVD players and more recently DVR devices and streaming video services, VHS players have become obsolete. The same thing happened to 8-track tapes, vinyl records, cassettes, and CDs. Today, most people buy their music in digital format and listen to it on their iPods. The Elvis Presley brand is timeless, but no one buys Elvis music on cassettes anymore.

Products Can Be Copied and Replaced but Brands Are Unique

A product can be copied by competitors at any time. When Amazon launched the Kindle e-reader device, it didn’t take long for competitors to come out with their own branded versions of an e-reader product. However, the brand associated with each e-reader device offers unique value based on the perceptions, expectations, and emotions that consumers develop for those brands through previous experiences with them.