Everyone in marketing has a definition of “brand.” Most of them circle around the truth, but they are inaccurate, and therefore dangerous half-truths.
Spend five minutes on LinkedIn and you’ll see the usual suspects:
“A brand is an experience.”
“A brand is a promise.”
“A brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
"A brand is a logo" People who still say this are not part of the conversation.
“A brand is a metric.” (A senior agency leader actually just tried to convince me on LinkedIn that brand is just a metric. True story.)
Cute. Tweetable. Useless.
You can define "brand" in however many ways you want, but most will be wrong. The question here is what it actually is. That's why so many of these definitions are sloppy and not very useful.
Let’s get serious.
A brand is not an experience. Experiences might be orchestrated by companies as output, but they are inputs when it comes to "brand". You can design a beautiful website, offer a wonderful car-rental experience, light a perfect store, hand out sustainable tote bags, speak in the right tone at the right time, give me a massage when I enter your store — but what matters is what happens after. The brand is the perception that experience leaves behind. We then give that perception a meaning (either positive, neutral, or negative). It’s the residue in the mind.
An experience is what happens to you. A brand is what stays with you.
The latte, the ad, the unboxing — those are moments.
The brand is what your brain does with those moments afterward.
It’s the perception that hardens into meaning.
And that meaning attaches itself to a symbol — a name, a logo, a piece of design — and waits there quietly until the next time you have to make a choice.
That’s why the real work of brand isn’t in the design file, the font choice, or the brand book. It’s in the interpretation.
The brand lives in the customer’s head.
I've never flown on Virgin Atlantic. But I like and respect the brand a lot. I've heard stories, I've seen ads, etc. I don't have a first-hand experience of them. How then, is a brand the experience? It does not make sense. But creating great experiences certainly does help when building brands.
A brand is not a promise either. Promises live in decks. People don’t buy promises; they buy the value the perceive something to deliver. Sure, we have expectations of brands, and we might choose certain brands because we expect them to live up to certain standards, whether that relates to experience, meaning, identity, taste, or whatever. But a brand is much closer to the actual offering than a promise.
If your product fails, your “promise” dies instantly. A brand, when real, survives broken promises because it lives in accumulated belief — what people feel is true about you, not what you once said on a stage.
And no, a brand isn’t “storytelling” or “purpose” or “community.” Those are tactics orbiting the planet called choice.
Because when you strip away the jargon, the only useful definition of brand is this:
👉 A brand is a perception.
This perception inside your mind leads to a meaning, which directly affects customer choice.
And to a business, that is everything. It's an existential question, not just "added value" or hot air. It's binary. You either get chosen or not.
Perceptions lead to meaning that we hold toward brand names. We attach meaning to brands not just because of what they do (the company behind it), but because of who we are and what we value.
Choice is the scoreboard. You’re either chosen or you’re not. You can affect choice only in three ways, actually:
1. Get more people to choose you
2. Get people to choose to pay more for your brand
3. Get people to choose to buy from you more times
And what drives choice? One thing more than anything else: Relevance. Not reach, not heritage, not differentiation, not your hex color. Relevance. Does it feel like it’s for me, right now, in my life? That’s the question every buyer answers — consciously or not — in every category, from toothpaste to Teslas.
What drives Relevance?
Surely not only marketing communications, logos, colors, messages, jingles, campaigns. Relevance comes from the sum of nearly everything you do (or don't do). Certainly your product or service, and how you signal it. Which is why "brand" must be led from the very core of the business, not from one "wing" called marketing.
Differentiation? Great to have. But it only matters after relevance. If you’re not relevant, nobody’s comparing you to anything.
So here’s the uncomfortable truth: most brand conversations are about the wrong thing. We obsess over the stuff we make — design, campaigns, purpose decks — instead of the perception we create. We polish the car instead of tuning the engine.
The brand doesn’t live in your logo, your tone of voice, or your CX flow.
The brand lives in the synapses of your customer’s brain. It’s the shortcut they take when deciding whether to pick you or someone else.
That’s why all brand work is ultimately about engineering perception. That's the -ing part in branding. About understanding what drives relevance — the intersection of what people need, believe, and aspire to — and building every decision around that.
Everything else is noise.
So the next time someone says, “Brand is experience,” smile politely and ask: “Then why do two people have the same experience and walk away feeling completely different?”
Because one of them experienced a brand. The other just had an experience.
Experience → Perception → Meaning → Choice
Sure this will provoke some people, so let's have it in the comments section 😊
Tobias
p.s. for more free, thought-provoking ideas, trends, insights for originally-minded people, go to thebrief.media and sign up.
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