branding

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The promotion of a product or service in order to build greater public awareness of its brand.

   The company spent millions on branding before the new launch.

   Careful branding turned an unknown drink into a household name.

   Similarmarketing, promotion, advertising, publicity

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The visible trade dress of a brand: its trademarks, wordmarks, color schemes, and liveries.

   The airline refreshed its branding with a new logo and tail design.

   Counterfeiters copied the company's branding down to the exact shade of blue.

   Similarlivery, identity, image, look

   Note

   The result rather than the activity. The promotional effort is something a company does, but this is something it owns and can put on goods or strip from them. It comes naturally with possessives (our branding, all of their branding), and it reaches past the near-synonym labeling. Labeling suggests a tag or sticker, while branding takes in colorways, liveries and the whole look of the goods.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The process of burning a mark, usually a symbol or pattern, into the skin of a living animal or person, most often livestock.

   The ranch still uses branding to identify its cattle each spring.

   Branding leaves a permanent scar in the shape of the owner's mark.

   Similarmarking

   Note

   Not only a rancher's word: it was long a penalty for people too. Maneckji Nusservanji Dhalla's Zoroastrian Civilization (1922) ranks it with fine, imprisonment and hard labor as punishment for theft. As a countable noun it names individual marks, and it now sits beside tattooing as body modification. Mitch Keller, writing in the New York Times in 2008, says tattoos are no longer "the radical brandings" they once were.

4. 4
   verb

   Present participle of brand.

   The marketing team is branding the product as eco-friendly.

   Ranchers were branding cattle long before modern record-keeping existed.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every sense of the verb, from the hot iron to the marketing department. It also carries the figurative one of stigmatizing, as when a critic is branding someone a traitor. Nearly all of these senses are transitive, so an object usually follows directly: branding cattle, branding a product. Without one, or with of (the branding of cattle), it has crossed over into the noun for the burning.

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