A successful brand creates a positive association in a customer's mind, sells a promise, and tells a story about who we are. The virtues of creating brand identity to attract product sales have been acknowledged for decades. But branding-once considered a helpful, rather than necessary flourish-has assumed status in today's world as a key ingredient to winning business.
America pours upwards of $300 billion dollars into branding every year. On any given day, each of us is bombarded by between 3,000 and 5,000 ads. In myriad ways, we are subtly branded through every chapter of our lives: by the clothes whose logos we complacently sport, by the music we listen to, by the beverages we drink and the food we eat, by the books we read, even by the neighborhoods in which we choose to live.
With hundreds of new products arriving on retail shelves every day, and the rise of cheaper foreign brands and the house brands of mega-stores like Target and Wal-Mart, American companies are increasingly