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Many people find the concept of a “brand” to be vague. We can try defining it quantitatively: a brand is the statistical distribution of words & images that a given audience associates with a brand name or logo.
You can measure this empirically by (a) surveying an audience or (b) looking at what they write and say about the brand online. The words and images they associate with the brand name/logo are the brand. Like software, a brand has an installed base — it’s just in people’s heads.
When people talk about the strength of a brand, they are implicitly referring to this installed base. A really powerful brand doesn’t just evoke a word association, it actually becomes the first word you think of. Example: you don’t just associate search with Google, you google.
This is also why people say that brand building is about consistency. Just like it can take a lot of ad impressions to get people to install software, it takes a lot of repetition to get people to remember a brand association. If a different word is used each time, won’t stick.
And it also explains why renames sometimes work. In theory, people will remember that X was once called Y. In practice, that extra mental lookup is friction, and means there is a chance to clear the slate of word associations and build a new brand. Example: Tiny Speck -> Slack.
