Brand building and brand management have become a critical issue for firms competing within heterogeneous industries.
Over the last decades, the brand evolved from a simple product attribute to the role of value creator for the entire firm.
Today brand management represents a very sophisticated business process whose aim is to assembly and maintain over the time the unique mix of physical attributes and intangible values that istinguish one brand identity from other’s.
A better understanding of the brand role starts from the right definition of brand and branding. The most quoted definition is that proposed by Kotler (1988) from an older definition proposed in 1960 from the American Association Committee on Definitions according to which the brand is " a name, terms or logo or design or a combination among them aiming at identifying a product or a service from one vendor or manufacturer and differentiate it from competitors".
Branding for many years has been seen as logos and advertisements. But is it nowadays evident that a brand is much more than a name or a logo. A brand is no longer just image projection. It's also truly about the company as a whole. Brand strategist1 affirm that brands recall clear associations in consumer mind: they talk about brand personality, a long term relationship with the consumer centered on emotional feelings more than on economic transactions.2 Branding is becoming more a function of the relationship and the experience the consumer has with the brand. Above all in industries producing symbol intensive goods there is a stronger connections of brands with people's personalities and beliefs.
In order to get a full understanding of the market potential associated to a brand it is necessary to use a broader definition of brand as an "aggregation, around specific signs of a complex of values, association, expectations to which clients assign a value that goes over the technical and functional attributes of the products identified by the brand itself"
