The other day while participating in a certain discussion in the marketing class i found myself listening to as well as speaking the words "brand" and "product" far too often. However, what I realized was that we are not too clear when to use these words. This prompted me a come back and read a bit about this. Following is a result of whatever I have understood.
A brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the descriptive verbal attributes and concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme that convey the essence of a company, product or service. A product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need.
To highlight the difference, I would like to put forth a recent example:
The ShahRukh Khan commercial featuring Dish TV concentrated on portraying its features viz. pause live shows, get the language of your choice, movies that you like and so on. Here, there is no real creativity involved. The ad is plain vanilla informative marketing.
However, the more recent commercial of "Tata Sky Plus" featuring Aamir Khan and Gul Panag concentrates more on talking to customer based on the experience from the perspective of a regular young couple which almost any middle class consumer can identify with. Thus, apart from providing information about the product to its target customers, the commercial is also successful in creating a long-lasting imprint in the viewers' minds - thus creating a better recall for its brand.
This example highlights one very important factor. The product in both the cases is DTH technology service. Although there are hardly any differences in terms of the products qualities and features, there is a marked difference in the way the target customers perceive the product. This is clearly due to the way the brands have been positioned.
So, on a broad level, we can generalize the some of the very visible differences between a Brand and Product:
At a very basic level, a product is something made at a factory. (This definition, in today's world is outdated as a product today can be a service being provided). A brand is something which is bought by the customer. Typically, a product can be copied by a competitor whereas a brand is unique - its either there or not there. A product may be outdated very quickly whereas a successful brand may be timeless. A products may change from time-to-time depending on its life cycle stage; a brand typically remains consistent over a long period of time. A product is a more producer/seller centric approach; a brand is a customer centric approach.
Typically, marketers yearn to convert their products into brands which can then be leveraged to get higher returns for their products. A brand involves a loyalty factor, thus making it very enticing for marketers to convert their long running products into brands. As a side note, one also needs to keep in mind that a strong brand can be built only for a strong product which performs according to the expectations consistently.
