Voices on Branding · a collaborative series
I put that one question to brand builders around the world and asked each of them for a quote. Ninety-nine answered, and I added my own, across 28 countries and 6 continents. Different voices, different angles, one collective view of branding. These definitions, together with the research behind them, are becoming a book, with every contributor credited by name.
Venture Designer & Brand Leadership Consultant
Branding is the alchemy of our time, transforming raw potential into meaningful value. It unites a brand's strategic elements into a living, story-driven experience that shapes perception, evokes emotion, and creates culture.
Host & Curator of Voices on Branding
Founder, Level5 Strategy; Adjunct Professor, Queen's University
Brand management is about building a true asset; an asset that creates value from its promise being consistently kept. Great brands invest in provocative insights that anticipate shifting consumer needs, align their organization through competencies, structures, and systems, and cultivate an inspiring vision and culture. This creates a brand that is measurable and accountable, growing as a leader-led business system.
Canada
Brand & Marketing Strategist
Brand, the cumulative result of a person's interactions with, experiences of and beliefs about a business (its products/services). A space held in the mind's eye. Strong brands must deliver across the board. Where 'delivery' is out of kilter with the promise made, then it stands to fall at the first hurdle; where product or positioning are poor, great service won't save it!
United Kingdom
Brand Builders Alliance, Founder
Branding is the intentional shaping of perception to build meaning and reputation.
Australia
Managing Principal of Capsule agency
Brands are a container of trust and meaning - branding is the act of adding more trust and meaning into a brand in order to make it more valuable to your stakeholders.
United States
Branding Evangelist
Branding is the strategic process of fostering emotional connections through commitment, creating a compelling construct (identity), building community, delivering relevant content, and maintaining consistency to shape how customers feel about a business, product, or service—the 5 C's of Branding.
Canada
Strategist and Father of Brand DNA
Brands are territories in the minds of your most valuable stakeholders - your unique Brand DNA is the most powerful way to relevant, compelling, distinctive and credible territories.
Canada
Full professor of marketing and experienced brand management expert
Brands are promises that people believe in. Brand management encompasses all activities to develop, communicate and keep such promises. Branding describes operational activities around the magic triangle of name & wording, logo & CI as well as packaging & sales concept.
Germany
Founding Partner Allegro 234
Branding is a purposeful, enterprise-wide endeavour that affirms a company's place within its category, elevates its distinctive attributes, and harmonises its raison d'être, strategy, culture, and experiences to inspire trust, shape preference, and foster lasting, conscious growth over time.
Spain
Chief Brand Architect, Branding Concier
Branding is etiquette at scale, like a five-star hotel anticipating needs and tailoring every detail of how it looks, feels, and speaks to a specific audience. Great hospitality makes a brand reliable, resonant, and unforgettable, keeping people returning, referring, and remembering you.
United States
Brand Evangelist. President APAC at Landor
Branding is the active process of shaping customer perception to drive business results. It involves meticulously managing every customer touchpoint, from advertising to customer service. The goal is to create a consistent and positive brand image that resonates with the target audience. Crucially, this means ensuring congruence between your brand's promise and how it's actually perceived. Forget mere "authenticity"; focus on delivering a tangible, valuable experience. The ultimate aim is a perception that compels customers to choose you, boosting sales and fostering loyalty.
India
Brand strategist-at-large
Branding is power. It gives an organisation the ability to amaze and astonish, to comfort and reassure, to impress.
United Kingdom
The World's Most Industrious Storyteller at The Business of Story
Your brand is the story people tell about you when you're not there. You shape it by centering customers, showing what you make happen in their lives, and consistently delivering on those promises.
United States
Partner, Chameleon Collective; Founder, FINIEN
Branding is deepening the truth, marketing is stretching it.
United States
Brand Strategist
Branding is the process of aligning all aspects of a brand, including its values, behaviour, experience, name, and promotions.
United States
Agency Coach at Agency Outsight
Branding isn't just a logo or a tagline. It's how people feel when they come across anything tied to your business. And in today's world, you don't get many chances to wow them. So do it right the first time, or someone else will.
United States
Brand Enthusiast
Your brand lives in the hearts and minds of your community that includes customers and employees. You first set your brand up with clear purpose of function, social and emotional benefits. Then you deliver on that promise.
Australia
Founder, Common Giant
Branding is the intentional process of shaping the emotional meaning that customers and stakeholders attach to an organization, company, product, or service. More than art and copy, or a one-time execution, it's shaped across touchpoints, visuals, sounds, and experiences.
United States
Concept Design Director
Branding is the reduction of a company's core - tethered with rigorous visual metaphor to communicate via instinct, impact, and feeling, echoing the company's DNA and delivery. When these elements meet, they form strategic alignment for growth, resonance, and enduring connection.
Australia
Founder of Identity Bureau Agency
The act of branding is to go through the thought process behind how you want your business to be perceived, and then to take the steps to create that perception.
United Kingdom
Brand Designer
Branding is about shaping a customer's experience, whether using a product, talking to a service rep, or purchasing online. Every touchpoint is considered a brand experience.
Malaysia
Brand strategist, Brand Strategy Academy founder
Branding is the process of creating and applying distinctive assets that help your brand get noticed. These assets help to trigger, build and reinforce the associations you want to stand for.
United Kingdom
Founder & Chief Consultant, The Truth Quarry
Brand is a formative discipline of conditioning raw opportunity. Branding is exercising that discipline; training perception into performance so people don't just recognize you, they respect and choose you.
United States
Brand Identity Designer & Founder, Boundless Underdog Studio
Branding is the bridge between vision and impact, it transforms ideas into identities that connect, resonate, and lead. At its best, branding doesn't just make you seen; it makes you unforgettable.
United States
Author, Message Market Fit
Branding is recognition, not choice. It's when your story becomes their story. When they claim your message not because you asked, but because it already reflects who they are.
United States
Full-Stack Brand Builder | Co-founder @ Factory 39
Branding is the difference between being seen and being remembered.
Cyprus
Brand strategist, designer and founder of Cheerleader Agency
Branding is the living expression of people's shared pride, potential, and dreams for the future. It's the connecting thread that weaves personal views into a team, and gut feeling into leadership.
Netherlands
Brand Strategy & Growth Advisor
Branding is the alchemy of transforming business into a state of coherence.
Canada
Brand Strategist / Designer
Branding is about building reputation. It's much more difficult to recover a damaged reputation than it is to keep it whole in the first place. So go slow, and do everything right the first time.
United States
Brand Strategy Consultant
Branding is the constant and holistic practice of influencing how people feel about your business.
Spain
Co-founder of The Brand Guys & Author of Fight The Average
Branding is all about fighting the average — building a brand that people feel, in a world where most just follow what works.
Belgium
Brand Strategist & Community Builder @ CConnect
Branding is how you build trust at scale. It's the soul of your business, lived out through design, words, and the communities you serve.
Canada
Brand identity designer
Branding is the intentional and ongoing process of aligning the story you live with the story you tell, in order to influence the story others believe and share about you.
Portugal
Brand Pro
The reason to choose :)
United Arab Emirates
Corporate Brand Strategist and Fractional CMO
Branding is the unique emotional experience that deeply resonates and connects with your customers. A consistent and clear basis of differentiation between you and your competitors.
United Kingdom
Brand Architect and Designer
Brand is an expression of your business, built with truth, not tactics, so that trust and loyalty with the right audience is why you matter, and get remembered.
Ireland
Head of Strategy & Insights, Brand Lounge
Branding is the science of emotion. It's how we wrap the rational tangibles, that can be matched and even surpassed, in a purpose-driven emotional connection with the audience. Branding is the true business driver, never the other way around.
United Arab Emirates
Brand Chef at Boch Creative
Branding is finding your company's unique recipe and feeding it to the people who want to have that every time they're hungry.
United States
Brand Strategist & Designer
People trust what's clear, notice what's different, and remember what shows up again and again. Branding just connects the dots.
Nigeria
Plug-in Brand & Business Partner
Branding is how a business connects with its audience. Not just how it looks, but what it stands for, how it behaves and, most importantly, how people experience and engage with it. It is the relationship, not the logo.
United Kingdom
AI & Marketing Executive | LinkedIn Top 100 AI Creative Educator | Coach, Storyteller and Innovative Project Leader
Branding is the pulse of meaning that cuts through chaos, where strategy becomes story, and story becomes the echo that lingers long after the noise fades.
United States
Founder & Creative Brand Therapist
Branding is showing up with intention and purpose to emotionally and instinctually resonate with a group of people. Branding is emotional communication at its most primal form.
United States
Executive Brand Strategist & Academic
Branding is the strategic pursuit of clarity. Brands grow and succeed when they clarify what authentically differentiates them, focus their teams as brand ambassadors and align all marketing to this clarity.
South Africa
CVO - Chief of Viral Operations
Branding is the gateway to your product/company. That said, you can have the greatest branding in the world but if your product/company doesn't match the level of your branding it will end up being a fool's errand.
United States
Iconic Brands Creator & Creative Hacker
Building a brand means translating a worldview into a coherent system of signs, decisions, and experiences. It means shaping the invisible with rigor, sensitivity, and purpose. A brand, in short, is a symbolic architecture filled with content and meaning.
Spain
Brand strategy executive
Branding is the journey from promise to proof ... aligning what you claim with what you consistently deliver. Every choice should build the trust that ultimately becomes connection and emotional resonance.
United States
Brand Strategist
More than a marketing function, branding is a strategy-driven process that unites every part of a business to deliver its promise to its audience consistently. The result? One of the company's most valuable long-term assets!
Canada
Head of Content at Backbase
A brand is the perception held in the mind of an individual about a product, person or company. Branding is the deliberate strategy and execution to influence and shape those perceptions.
South Africa
Brand Storytelling and Reinvention Architect, Founder of Baas Studio
Branding is the moment your truth becomes felt before it's understood. It's the warmth people step into when your story, your values, and your presence flow together. When you live in alignment, your brand becomes a place people recognize without effort.
United States
Brand Psychologist | Founder, Build Smart Brands
A brand is the perception others hold of you, your business, and your offer. Branding is the act of maintaining that perception while remaining true to the company's vision, through every touchpoint, every team member, and every experience from day one.
United States
The Ghetto Country Brandmother®
Branding is not about being seen. It's about being known and being clear on what you're known for. Branding is behavior. It's about how you move, how you show up, and what your brand is whispering behind your back.
United States
Brand Strategist, Founder of Brand Master Academy
Branding is the approach and actions a brand takes to create alignment and shape how their audience perceives them, to ultimately start and build a relationship.
Australia
Executive Brand Strategy Consultant
A brand is the meaning that your audience attach to you and your offer - Branding is the audacious attempt to manage that meaning.
United Kingdom
Brand consultant and BrandStruck founder
Branding – the collection of assets that identify and distinguish a brand. This includes visual elements like logo, colour palette and typography, as well as other sensory cues such as jingles, sound logos or a distinctive scent. Some people use the term more broadly to describe the entire process of building a brand, but I believe the narrower, asset-focused definition is more commonly used.
United Kingdom
Strategist & Entrepreneur
Branding is the act of shaping the idea people hold in their minds about you. Brands live in perception, co-created through the signals you send. The goal: influence customer choice so the right people choose you over alternatives.
Finland
Author of The Smart Marketing Book, Brand Consultant
Branding is creating strong memory structures around your brand that make it instantly recognisable and help it come to mind quickly when people are thinking about meeting a need or desire that your brand can fulfil.
United Kingdom
Personal Branding and Influence Expert
Branding is emotion in action. It shapes how people feel about your company and why they'll remember you. Branding is the expectation of an experience, and the reason people choose you.
United States
Brand Director
Branding is the ongoing effort to shape public perception through consistent actions, visuals, and experiences, ensuring your business remains memorable and meaningful in a crowded marketplace.
United Kingdom
Brand Strategy Director & Professor
Branding is when people say, 'this feels so like that brand,' without you ever saying a word. It's a story that lives in people's minds and hearts—one that no one else can truly own. Not even AI could fake it.
Peru
Brand Ecosystem Strategist
A brand is the narrative deeply rooted in the customer's mind about an experience, a narrative that shapes perception, influences decision-making, and triggers emotion. Branding is the strategic engineering of processes that create, shape, and manage that narrative.
United States
Creative Brand Strategist
Branding is the feeling before the facts. It's not what you sell, it's your story, your sauce, your vibe. It's how logos become cults, brands become lifestyles, and customers become obsessed.
United Kingdom
Chief Brandteller, Brandtelling
Great branding connects through memorable, repeatable stories. Brand storytelling is authentic and focuses on building and strengthening relationships. It's about understanding your role in supporting your customer's success.
United States
Brand Architect (Strategist | Designer)
Branding is how you hold space in someone's mind. It's not just how you show up, but how you stay. Like a well-built space that becomes part of your memory more than just what you saw. Great brands are built like great spaces: with purpose, structure, and something that lasts.
Turkey
Marketing Strategist
Branding is the space you occupy in someone's mind when your language, imagery and lived experience is so visceral people can't not remember what you do for them.
Australia
Founder & CEO, Essence Branding
Branding is the practice of revealing a brand's truth. Its intention, essence, and culture, and translating it into experiences that create real value, human connection, and lasting impact.
Brazil
The Brand Mechanic
You don't flinch when someone asks who your mechanic is. Or your builder. Or your favourite restaurant. You name them instantly - because they have a trusted place in your mind. Branding is how that kind of trust is engineered - at scale.
United Kingdom
Senior lecturer at Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Branding is an art of assigning unique sensory elements (such as names, colours, slogans, jingles, designs, symbols) to an offering primarily for differentiation, identification, associations, profits and purpose.
South Africa
Founder and CEO, Brand by Boudica
Branding is the bold act of transforming raw intention into meaning, forging emotional connections that outlast trends and spark audiences to claim your story as their own.
United Kingdom
Brand Strategy & Design, Founder of Brandsimple.dk
Branding is clarity and alignment, defining who you are, what you do, and why it matters to the right audience. When strategy and identity point in one direction, trust grows, complexity disappears, and the business gains power.
Denmark
Founder of Valiente & Creative Director
Branding is how you make people feel about your business. It's more than a logo - it's your story, your purpose, and the emotion people remember long after they've interacted with your brand.
Mexico
(Mis) Chief Creator at Wonderment
Branding is the art of turning the mundane into the magical. Making business not just stand out, but stand alone. It creates connection, sparks joy, and transforms companies into unforgettable brands people can't help but love.
United States
Brand Builder & Founder of Ginen Studio
Branding is declaration. It is truth made visible. Not just how you are seen, but how you are felt. Rooted in identity, shaped by story, held with intention.
Guam
Founder of PrettyGood, Building Brands For Good
Branding is about creating memory and mental shortcuts that make your business the obvious choice when buyers eventually enter the market. Because 95% aren't buying today, the great brands win by being remembered tomorrow.
New Zealand
Brand Strategist - Level C Certification
What is branding? A brand lives in your head, but you carry it in your heart. It's the process of giving human attributes to a business.
United States
Sr. Manager, Branding
Branding is managing everything a brand represents. It's the ongoing process of creating meaning and value through strategy, culture, and experience.
Brazil
Brand & Visual Designer
Branding is a bridge built on emotion. Its look and feel guide the journey, but connection is what carries you across.
United Kingdom
The Brand Making Geek
Brand is the experience. Branding is the anticipation.
United Kingdom
Brand-to-Demand Strategy Leader
Branding is a resonating identity system that captures hearts and minds. It's a verbal, visual, and experiential stamp that makes something or someone feel familiar and memorable, building trust and giving people a reason to return as the brand evolves.
United States
Content Brand Strategist & Visual Identity Designer
If a brand were a disco ball, branding makes the sparkle, mirrors, lighting, and tiny details ready before the dancing begins. When the party ends, it's time to polish, mirrors, lights, and every detail cleaned up and realigned for the next dance...
United Kingdom
The branding guy | CEO @ Shai Creates
Brand is everything. Everything is brand.
United States
Marketing Director
Branding is the shortcut in the consumer's mind. It reduces choice, builds trust, and drives preference. Done right, it lowers costs and raises margins. Done wrong, it's just expensive decoration.
Poland
Fractional Brand Director
Branding builds a foundation of mission, values, positioning, and visual identity to guide goals and strategy. It clarifies your company's purpose, aligns teams, and communicates your vision internally and externally, making it essential to business planning and growth.
United States
Director - Broadwise Solutions
Branding is intentional, authentic persuasion. Show up clearly and consistently so, when the need hits, buyers already want to talk to you.
United Kingdom
Founder of Laura Baer Design | Brand Identity designer
Branding is the way you shape how people feel about your business. It's the spark someone gets when they first encounter you (the instinctive yes they can't always explain).
United States
Senior Brand and Design Director
Branding is the art of creating meaningful associations, where the true value of a brand lies not just in its products or services, but in who connects with it and the emotions, identities, and communities it inspires.
New Zealand
Advisor, Alchemist, Author of "Neurobranding"
Branding is the memory you leave behind. It's not your logo, tagline, or ad spend. It's the emotional imprint that lives rent-free in people's minds, shaping how they remember, trust, and choose you.
United States
Strategic Brand Designer / Certified Strategist
Branding is the process of turning a business or person into a brand. It's crafted through every detail, every interaction, action, tone, visual, and emotion. The goal is to create a clear feeling and image in people's minds.
Saudi Arabia
Strategic Brand Integrator
Branding is your business's soul made visible. It's integrating every puzzle piece, values, message, team, systems—into a cohesive, aligned experience that your audience doesn't just see, but feels and trusts at every single touchpoint.
United States
Brand Consultant
Great brands aren't about clever marketing and big budgets. They're about personality and emotion. They're created by people who know what their business stands for from day one. They have a clear identity and they live and breathe.
United Kingdom
Michael (The Bustinator™) Bustin, Material Brand Critic™
Branding is how you tell your story without words. It's the craft of shaping every touchpoint so people feel your vibe before you ever speak.
United States
Brand Architect, founder of reBrand Agency
Branding is your identity, your story, your values, your culture and the promise you make to your customers.
United States
Brand Strategy & Packaging Design at Sojo Creative
Brand is like falling in love- every signal has the power to build trust. Branding is the intentional alignment of those signals - with the understanding that while you can't control perception, you can influence it.
United Kingdom
Brand Strategist
Branding is the purposeful practice of bringing the unique qualities of an organisation to life. Great branding is an art that unites storytelling, visual identity and values so that people know who you are and what you stand for.
United Kingdom
Founder and Creative Director | Overtone
Your brand is what people think, feel and remember about you. Branding is how you shape and guide those perceptions.
Australia
Head of Brand Transformation at Q Branch Consulting
Branding is the deliberate, meaningful connection of an idea, business, product or mission to humans.
United Kingdom
Brand Strategy Director
A brand must encourage people to think, feel, or do something you'd like them to. Branding is the act of shaping 'Associated Memorable Moments™' – a series of moments which people remember & associate with one another.
United Kingdom
Global Executive Director, Landor
Branding is the strategic and creative effort required to make a company / product / service uniquely attractive and enduringly memorable. It serves one purpose: to get more people to buy you more often for more money. In short, branding = preference generation.
United Kingdom
CEO of Focus Lab, a B2B Branding Agency
Brand is the entire ecosystem around your company that leads to a feeling or perception in the eyes or hearts of your customers.
United States
Fixer of brands, marketing & experiences
Brand is the most valuable intangible asset a business has. It's a shortcut to a decision. A strong brand has CRED; it is Cohesive, Relevant, Easy and Different. Part of this is branding - how you look, feel and sound.
United Kingdom
Partner at bold position® – strategy for brand & talent
A name becomes a brand through the relevant collective associations and expectations people attach to it. While meaning attached by people is crucial, a brand also relies on active management and consistent communication to shape and sustain those associations.
Austria
This is the full collection: all hundred voices, gathered over six parts of the series.
The book, the letter, and the open door to add your own definition.
The book
The hundred definitions, the research behind them, and what the answers revealed together are being written into a book. Every contributor is credited by name. Leave your email and I will tell you the day it is published.
One email, when the book is out.
The series is still open. If you build brands for a living and you have an answer worth adding, I would like to include it.
I will ask for your photo by email.
A letter for people building ventures and brands: what I am reading, the models I am actually using, and notes from the work. One letter every two weeks, and nothing else.
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I design brand-led ventures, and build brands that create strategic value.