I recently went to see a high paid speaker who is one of Canada's most well-known and wealthy marketing gurus and I was disappointed - yet again the marketing world has confused what BRANDING really means. She spent half of her talk discussing how non-marketing experts have a hard time figuring out what branding means and that only true professionals really know how to define it. Well, she's wrong. Marketers are confused and everyone else has it straight; and I can say this after owning a marketing company for years. Marketers have made the concept so complicated and tried to appear smart, but have gotten so far from the true definition even they don't know what it really is. She was trying to say that branding is the way others would describe your company when they see an ad or commercial - in other words what's the word on the street about your business, and what do the employees say it's about. I would argue this is your culture not your brand.
A brand, plain and simple, is a marking (burned or not as you see below) that labels something to a certain person / business. In others words, no matter how hard marketers try to tell you it's not about your logo - it is! You design a brand and stamp it everywhere. Whereas your culture is created over time and can't be designed, it simple happens based on the environment you create about and around your business.
Here's the true definition of brand according to http://dnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn:
trade name: a name given to a product or service
identification mark on skin, made by burning
burn with a branding iron to indicate ownership; of animals
a piece of wood that has been burned or is burning
mark: a symbol of disgrace or infamy; "And the Lord set a mark upon Cain"--Genesis
