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A brand is defined as a name, term, sign, symbol, design or a combination of them intended to identify the goods or services of one seller, or a group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors. The legal term for brand is trademark. Brands as a reference to the maker have a long history. For example, the medieval guilds required that craftspeople put trademarks on their products to protect themselves and consumers against inferior quality, or at least against unlicensed competitors.

Brands may be owned by the manufacturer, known as A-brands or manufacturer brands but also by a trading house or the reseller of the product, private labels. In many cases these private labels are owned by retailers in which case they are known as store brands. With many manufacturers outsourcing all their production and with trading houses extending the range of products carrying their private label, the distinction between brands and private labels is rapidly fading. What remains important these days is a distinction between store brands and others. The distribution of store brands is restricted to the outlets of that store, whereas the other brands do not have this restriction. Increasingly retailers are using their store brands in their marketing strategies as a means to differentiate themselves from other retail chains.

A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or many or even all items of that seller. As a result, brands come in different forms and formats. Some companies carry one brand name and one visual style in different product groups or product classes. Examples include Philips (light bulbs and CD-players), Yamaha (motorcycles and pianos), and Peugeot (cars, bicycles, pepper grinders) in which case the brand is referred to as an umbrella brand or family brand. Sometimes two brand names are used on the same article. For example, companies like Nestle and Unilever carry their corporate brand name on the pack together with the individual brand name with the aim to benefit both from the corporate image and the individual brand name image. Sometimes this combination of corporate and individual brand names is even more subtle such as in the Nestle brands Nestea and Nescafe or the McDonald’s brand names McDo and McChicken. New brands may also be combined with existing individual brand names (as in Becel/Flora ProActive) in which case the brand value of the parent brand (Becel/Flora) extends into the sub-brand (Pro-Active). Brand combinations may also occur in the case of ingredient branding and co-branding.

From a consumer perspective, brands extend well beyond their pure descriptive information content on what is the source or the maker of the brand. Companies produce and name products, but brands are made in the minds of the consumer. An example of this consumer basis of a brand is the following: Blaupunkt was founded in 1923 under the name Ideal. The core business was the manufacturing of headphones. If the headphones came through quality tests, the company would give the headphones a blue dot. The headphones quickly became known as the blue dots or [in German] blaue Punkte. The quality symbol would become a trademark, and the trademark would become the company name in 1938. A brand is `an identifiable product or service augmented in such way that the buyer or user perceives relevant unique added values that match their needs most closely’. Fundamental to this definition is the implicit assumption that the branded product or service delivers the functional and psychological benefits that the customer has paid for and has a right to expect.