Advertising is a powerful tool, not to build leadership of a fledgling brand, but to maintain that leadership once it is obtained. Companies that want to protect their well-established brands should not hesitate to use massive advertising programs to smother the competition.

The most efficient, most productive, most useful aspect of branding is creating a new category. In other words, narrowing the focus to nothing and starting something totally new.

The minute a brand begins to stand for something in the mind, the company that owns the brand looks for ways to broaden the base, to get into other markets, to capture other attributes. This is a serious error and one of the most common mistakes in branding.

If the market is moving out from under you, stay where you are and launch a second brand. If it’s not, stay where you are and continue building your brand.

Today most products and services are bought, not sold. And branding greatly facilitates this process. Branding “pre-sells” the product or service to the user. Branding is simply a more efficient way to sell things.

Words are the key to brand building.

When you broaden your brand, you weaken it.

Customers don’t really care about new brands, they care about new categories. They don’t care about Domino’s; they care about whether or not their pizza will arrive in thirty minutes. They don’t care about Callaway; they care about whether or not an oversize driver will cut strokes off their golf scores. They don’t care about Prince; they care abou

If you want to build a brand, you must focus your branding efforts on owning a word in the prospect’s mind. A word that nobody else owns.