Branding is everything which makes you special and unique, and distinguishes you from your competitors: your logo, your website, your brand style guidelines. If marketing is what gets people to engage with your company for the first time, branding is what keeps them coming back for years to come. Marketing ideas may come and go, branding permanently shapes your brand.

With product branding it is important to connect the right audience to the product. That is why product brands pay a lot of attention to their aesthetic choices: the colour and font type for their logo, website and marketing materials must be consistent because they shape potential buyers’ perception of the company’s products. For example, the brand colours of the famous fizzy drink that are red, white and blue, came about during World War II as a show of patriotism and connection to the American flag. Still the colours have stayed in use to this day, the company can still claim to be a patriotic brand and will attract customers for whom such values are important.

Not only celebrities have strong personal brands. Charismatic founders and leaders of companies like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk are often associated with their brand even if their company expands and their involvement changes. They represent certain values and emotions, and their brand encapsulates their talents and who they are.

Sporting events like the Olympics or music festivals like Coachella are often produced or sponsored by event brands or product brands which want to be a part of such goodwill experiences and often get new customers there. The most important thing is to make such an event consistent with the brand. Conferences of a renowned technology company are known for their creative sessions, streamlined design, hip entertainment and modern innovations – and these are the words often associated with the brand: creative, streamlined, hip and modern.

Geographical brands are also known as city or destination brands. These brands capitalise on the feelings that a given city or region evokes in order to be associated with the related ideas or concepts. 221B Baker Street in London is a perfect example of a geographical brand, which is immediately associated with Sherlock Holmes and attracts lots of tourists on a regular basis.

Service brands are characterised by the need to maintain the consistent high level of their service delivery, a strong positive image and customer interactions, which requires some creativity. For example, one of the airlines offers a brand service called “Meet&Seat” which gives passengers an option of sitting next to interesting people, based on their social media profiles. Such experiences leave positive, maybe even delightful impressions with users, which helps to build the brand relationship.

Prestige brands deliver social status and they often use celebrity endorsement to promote their business. If managed effectively, this strategy often yields long‑term benefits like increased brand loyalty and brand equity, which ultimately translate to higher sales turnover and brand value. When Julia Roberts became the spokesperson for the famous French luxury perfumes and cosmetics house in 2010, she helped the brand make profits of $100 million.

A global brand has worldwide recognition because of consistent brand identity, which may include the brand’s mission, visual elements such as logos, and the company’s value proposition. All of them should reflect the brand’s core activity so that customers from different countries and regions would know what to expect. For example, the logo of the famous American technology company specialising in e‑commerce is recognised all over the world, and its arrow pointing from A to Z represents what the online giant does – it sells exactly everything from A to Z.

Corporate brands communicate mostly with a wide range of stockholders like investors, governments, local communities, trade unions or employees, but also increasingly with consumers and customers who want to know who they buy from. One of the popular sports brands is a hit both with sports personalities and common men and women. Its mission statement makes it very clear to the world that it is a brand that includes everyone, not only professional sportspeople but also anyone who has a zeal for sports and fitness.

Premium brands position their products in a way that makes them more valuable. People want to feel special, admired or even envied by others, and if buying premium goods allows them to experience these feelings, they will value them more – and gladly pay more for them. Premium brands are often equated with luxury brands, but they are slightly different concepts: premium brands offer high quality products at high prices, but available on the mass market, whereas luxury brands sell products which are not only expensive and of superior quality but also extraordinary and rare, so it’s very difficult to buy them – sometimes it can be done only directly from the manufacturer.