When assuming brand leadership, an organisation (company or institution) chooses to excel with its brand(s) with an eye to increasing the organisation’s operating profit. In order to make this happen, a brand has to be deployed as the driving force behind all of the organisation’s activities. This means that brand management is not merely a tactical part of marketing, but rather that the brand – or branding – has ‘permeated into every part of the organisation’. The brand and the philosophy behind it not only define what the product, service or marketing communication looks like. When the brand has truly permeated into every pore of an organisation it will also be a guiding principle in HRM, R&D, and even influence the purchase of products and materials.  Marketing, HRM, R&D and the like are, in other words, part of brand management.

In the period between 1980 and 1985, financial analysts in the US cottoned on to the fact that brands are strong drivers of business performance. Following these analysts, marketing professionals also started to heed the role and function of the brand in business.  In the 1990s, branding was tackled from the perspective of marketing science. Well-known authors who researched branding include Jean-Noël Kapferer, Klaus Brandmeyer and David Aaker. Just after the turn of the century, a newfound belief emerged that found that return on pursued branding policy strongly depended on the question whether the internal organisation manages to fulfil the external brand promise; an observation that was corroborated by studies into companies’ brand orientation. But understanding of the fact that the brand is the concept that has to substantiate product development, if new products are to be successful, also started to grow. These developments all revolved around the idea that the brand is a concept that drives the business.

Branding branched off from marketing as a sub-field for fast-moving consumer goods. Nowadays, branding is particularly popular among service providers and business-to-business companies, where marketing has become a discipline that is subordinate to branding. Branding is also high on the agenda at not-for-profit organisations and public sector organisations (as in city branding, for example). As is the case at commercial organisations, non-commercial organisations tend to consider branding an ideal way of building a lasting competitive edge.