What exactly is a brand? It is a question which has confounded the lecturers for years and eluded the most erudite of students. Therefore coming from the trenches of real life of branding, we’ve outlined the term and given it an all-inclusive meaning..

A brand is composed of eight basic building blocks :

- The Name - The logo design (brand icon) - The Brand’s colors - The Slogan and Brand Messaging - The Sound of the Brand - The Overall look = The Brand’s Position - packaging the Brand - The Brand Experience

A Brand is the bigger sum of its parts. It is always more than only the nuts and bolts, the pieces ; great brands are always the result of the entire equaling more than the sum of its parts.

Branding is about making me, the buyer or customer, more hip, more in the “know,” more cool than anyone else. We are a generation and a country needing to be special. We want to be richer, more beautiful, better dressed and more easily gorgeous than any other generation that we know.

We need everything to mean more . We want everything to have meaning. That’s why we head to the reality shows. Why we love “The neophyte” and “American Idol” and other top pragmatic shows. We fancy genuineness in this age of fabrication and falsehood. We “just need to be real.”

We wish to be well placed to trust what we buy and whom we buy from. That’s why Coke remains the number one brand in the world. The more we all know about a brand, the more we trust it. The more we trust it, the more we buy it and continue to experience it. The more we experience it, the more steadfast we become.

Loyalty is the currency that cannot be traded for money.