Brands

A brand is the overall identity and impression a company builds around its goods or services. It is wider than a trademark: a trademark is a legal right that protects a sign used to identify a company's goods or services, while a brand is everything customers see, hear and feel about the company.

A brand often includes several trademarks, such as its logo, product names and slogans. Alongside those protected signs sit things that a trademark does not cover on its own: advertising campaigns, the design of letterheads, bags and receipts, the way staff serve customers, and the company's personality and reputation. Together these shape what people expect from the business.

Brand and trademark compared

Take Fern & Field, a garden centre chain. Its leaf-shaped logo, its own-brand compost called GrowWell and its slogan “Let it grow” are trademarks, so the law can stop a rival copying them. But the brand also includes the green paper bags, the free gardening advice videos, staff who remember regular customers, and a reputation for healthy plants. A rival could copy none of the trademarks and still not match the brand, because its shops might feel unfriendly and its advice poor.

Registering a trademark protects one sign; it does not by itself create a brand. A trademark is not another word for a brand — it is one of the building blocks a brand is made from, and the brand grows from how the business behaves and how customers judge it.