In its dictionary, the American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a “name, term, symbol, design, or other feature that distinguishes an organization or product from its rivals in the eyes of its customers.” With all due respect to the good people at the AMA, that definition is a long way out of date.

As any good marketer will know, a brand is a lot more than just a name or a symbol. They are the attributes that customers associate with a product, service, or company. They are what customers think of when they see the name or logo. The name and the symbol serve as psychological cues, bringing those attributes into the forefront of the mind. But they are not the brand itself.

Brand marks have been around for a long time; Chinese producers have been stamping makers’ marks on products for about a thousand years, but there was little understanding of the cognitive impact that brands had. In the nineteenth century Charles Babbage, better known as the father of the modern computer, wrote about brands in his book The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, suggesting that customers saw the brand symbol as an indicator of product quality. They would be more likely to buy trusted brands, he said, because they knew those brands would deliver value for money.

William Lever, later Lord Leverhulme and founder of a business empire that includes the modern-day Hindustan Lever, understood what Babbage was talking about. Lever designed one of the first soap brands, Sunlight, very much with the idea of communicating a message about quality. The name itself, Sunlight, implies something that is pure and clean; very much the values that people associate with soap. Lever marketed his product as brand that would deliver those values to the product’s end users.