What is a brand? How do brands benefit both customers and firms?

A brand is the producer's and the product's commercial identity.For customers,brands offer efficiency and assurance in overwhelmingly complex lives; brands may also offer abstract benefits,including comfort,risk reduction,and self-expression.To the marketing strategist,brands embody and retain the benefits,including loyalty and margins,from "a job well done," and can serve to facilitate distribution and accelerate new product launches (brand extensions).Brands hold meaning that can encompass a variety of aspects from functional and hedonic benefits to social significance and symbolism,and those meanings reside in the minds of consumers.