This revelation about branding comes your way due to an article published in The Sofia Echo on February 3 2006 reporting on the entry of Superbrands, the "global authority and arbiter on branding", in Bulgaria.

According to Bill Colegrave, managing director of Superbrands Worldwide, their award schemes are an incentive for companies themselves, the country they come from and its economic prosperity.

He points out that the mission of his organisation is to identify local brands that are performing above and beyond others in the market and to promote them all over the world.

As a result and as a first step of penetrating Bulgaria, Superbrands will identify the 500 most-remarkable brands operating on the domestic market on the basis of statistical data and analyses made by leading marketing agencies.

At the final stage, the companies whose brands are eligible for inclusion in the Superbrands project will be shot to stardom.

It is quite clear, however, that few business persons in Bulgaria, regardless of their country of origin, understand what a powerful tool branding is in today's increasingly small world.

Here comes the question: Does branding really matter for entrepreneurs?

Some would even ask whether it matters so much for entrepreneurs as it matters for global companies that have been on the market for decades. And a good argument it would be, provided that almost all companies operating in Bulgaria should feel as entrepreneurs in this emerging economy.

One of the problems with branding is that so few people understand what it is, why it matters and how it works.

An article posted on the website entrepreneur.com back in 2004, called Battle of the Brand, had some good points.

"Ask a group of entrepreneurs how much branding really matters, and you will get different answers. Some think it is really important, while others do not. Each entrepreneur could have a slightly different definition of branding, and a few might not even know, or really care, what branding is," the author Chris Penttila said.

Branding, specialists say, is any manager's well-planned co-ordination of every single touch point with the customer to create consistency of service within the company. In the end, branding is not about getting prospective clients to choose you over someone else. It is about getting them to see you as the only solution to their problem amid today's media clutter and price wars.

In the minds of many people, including the author of this revelation, branding is about chunking the essence of what you do and the value you bring into such a compact nugget that people get it and can communicate it. It is about creating a brand experience that is so incredible that people cannot wait to enjoy it all over again. It is also about being the kind of person that people like and want to do business with.

The funny thing is that people think a brand is something you need to manufacture. But the more I come to understand about branding, the more I see that it is really all about finding the truth.

What is it about your gifts and unique essence that benefits others? It can be tied to purpose and mission. When you are clear about who you are, why you are here, and you live that out through your work, it shows. People are attracted to do business with people who love what they do.

And another truth that may be confronted by many marketers. All customers are not created equal. For example, a typical commercial bank, and this is highly applicable to Bulgaria, will actually lose money on nearly 70 per cent of its customers, yet they often still market to them all equally. (The idea is not that a customer should ever be treated less well based on the size of his or her account, but in terms of marketing money.)

Instead of trying to improve satisfaction for all customers at all touch points, some smart people believe that an organisation must intimately understand the financial and satisfaction mix associated with each individual audience segment.

One reason is that less-valuable customers can often be served with less expensive touch points, still making it easy to do business, increase overall satisfaction levels and add value to each communication with a customer.

To achieve a measurable return on a company's communications investments, the company must intimately and ultimately understand the needs and associated economics of each customer group throughout the customer-relationship lifecycle.

With this data in hand, you can identify your most-valuable existing and potential customers, and understand the characteristics of your other customer segments as well. This will allow you to modify appropriate offers and service levels for each segment.

If, for example, a telephone transaction costs you five leva (that is in the case with the average bank) and an average in-person transaction 25 leva, you can make better decisions on how to deploy resources efficiently, ensuring that all offers, communications and interactions are delivered at the highest-appropriate level of quality for each audience. This means that you can serve some customers on the phone and others in person, depending on your interest in interacting with them.

The importance of brands must be realised by none others than the executives. Executive leadership within every organisation should recognise that brands are more than just the name of the company, a trademark for a product or a label for a service. The brand is a more-complex concept that creates organisational value and performs a number of important functions for every enterprise.

Brands and their combined value constitute the major economic force within the entire global economy, delivering marketplace value, shareholder wealth, livelihood, prosperity and culture.

There are hundreds of thousands of brands within this world, but only a few hundred brands move markets and are highly valued, as the book of the "global authority and arbiter on branding" shows.

Today, successful brands are recognised as rare and valuable assets that must be exploited carefully, with wise and knowledgeable management that retains their financial value, their economic power and their social significance.

Brands have become the most-valuable asset to any enterprise, making quintessential the knowledge, the art, the science and the work of each person in each working day, making them the ultimate symbol of much that is good and true and beautiful within the global economy.

Brand:
In marketing, a brand is the symbolic embodiment of all the information connected with a company, product or service. A brand typically includes a name, logo and other visual elements such as images, fonts, colour schemes or symbols. It also encompasses the set of expectations associated with a product or service typically arising in the minds of people. Such people include employees of the brand owner, people involved with distribution, sale or supply of the product or service, and, ultimately, consumers.

In other contexts, the term "brand" may be used where the legal term trademark is more appropriate.
In the field of marketing, brands originated in the 19th century with the advent of packaged goods. Industrialisation moved the production of mainly household items - such as soap - from local communities to centralised factories. When shipping their items, the factories would literally brand their logo or insignia on the barrels used, which is where the term comes from.
- Wikipedia