What is your brand and what does it say about your company? For many companies, branding is frequently ignored, because it’s only for the big guys with money to burn. They think it costs too much and doesn’t help their bottom line. Unfortunately, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Your brand is what you stand for, what you offer, what separates you from your competition — it’s the glue that holds all of your marketing together.

I had the privilege to interview one of the greatest minds in branding, Al Ries. He is a renowned branding consultant to companies such as Disney, Ford and H&R Block. He has also authored many books that are considered required reading on the topics of branding and marketing, including The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, Marketing Warfare, and Positioning (see special insert). Ries is a pioneer when it comes to the topic of branding, and we discussed in depth how companies big and small can benefit from branding.

According to Wikipedia, the word “brand” can be traced back to Old Norse “brandr,” meaning to burn — recalling the practice of burning livestock or products with their mark. And branding is the process of “burning” your company’s message (and value) into the minds of your clients and prospects.

In our hyper-competitive marketplace is a world of sameness, with similar products, services and companies. In a producers’ mind, everyone is the same — unless you tell them why you are different. And if you don’t have a brand, the market will decide it for you, and chances are it won’t be what you want to be remembered for.

So how do you create a brand? According to Ries, “A successful branding campaign is based on the concept of singularity. It creates in the mind of the prospect the perception that there is no product or service on the market quite like yours.” The most important aspect of a brand is focus. “It’s a single idea or concept that you own inside the mind of your prospect.”

While creating a brand is important to everyone in this business, making the market aware of it is where many companies struggle. All too often brands fail because companies fail to develop them and keep them on the minds of their clients and prospects.

One of the key takeaways that I got from this interview came when I asked Ries about advertising and branding, because oftentimes, companies think of advertising as an expense that can easily be cut or reduced to increase their profitability. I think that his response was something that everyone in this industry could learn and profit from:

“When you get to be the leader, the thing that keeps you in front is advertising that keeps the competitor silent. The best thing is to consider advertising as a price of leadership. We say advertising is insurance. You pay a small amount of sales revenue to guarantee that you’re not going to lose your leadership. It’s unlike life insurance, which pays off when you’re dead; this is insurance that keeps you alive.”