Understanding the neuroscience of branding comes down to answering a deceptively simple question: Where is the brand?

At one level, the brand rests inside the company that owns it. It’s a collection of intellectual property such as logos, mottos, jingles, etc. But these elements are rendered completely useless if they only stay internally. What’s the value of a beautiful logo if no one ever sees it?

The power of the brand comes from its external presence. It comes from what the logo comes to symbolize. So where, then, does the brand exist? The brand exists in the mind of the market. 

As the branding pioneer Walter Landolf once said, “products are made in the factory, but brands are made in the mind”. Neuroscientifically speaking, the brand is ultimately a pattern of connectivity in consumers’ brains. It is the totality of the emotional, and semantic associations that consumers have come to understand that the brand represents. And it’s this associative pattern that gives the brand it’s symbolic meaning.