Branding is perhaps the most important facet of any business--beyond product, distribution, pricing, or location.  A company's brand is its definition in the world, the name that identifies it to itself and the marketplace.  A model may be beautiful, but without a name, she's just "that girl in that picture."  Where would Norma Jean be without Marilyn Monroe, or who would imagine Coca-Cola as just a soft-drink manufacturer?  A brand provides a concrete descriptor to customers and competitors alike, a name for a product or service to distinguish it from anything else.  Bob may run a hobby shop, but trying to advertise as "The hobby shop a guy named Bob runs down the street a ways" is financial suicide.  Each customer will have to describe the shop, who Bob is, and what the shop does every time someone asks about it.  This makes the process of recommending a good hobby shop too much work for the average customer, and far too much work for a user looking for hobby shops on the Internet.  A customer looking up Bob's hobby shop will have an easier time of it if he or she knows to refer to it as "Bob's House of Hobbies," and the customer can then refer others to Bob's hobby shop by name, increasing the potential advertising exponentially.

Developing a brand involves more than just picking a catchy name and placing an ad in the newspaper--a brand is more than a unique string of letters denoting a particular product; a successful brand is a mnemonic trigger that makes a consumer feel a certain way when the brand is thought of.  For those who drink cola-flavored soft drinks, which is more appealing on a hot day: a cold cola soda, or an ice-cold Coke?  Coca-Cola has spent 100 years developing their particular brand of cola-flavored soda as a refreshing beverage and a seminal representation of a market segment.  Coca-Cola has used a combination of direct marketing, give-away techniques, and multi-product cross-branding to achieve maximum brand recognition and visibility in not only its immediately competitive market, but in markets as diverse as Coca-Cola branded race cars and house wares.