In short, a brand is the meaning you associate with a particular product or business. A logo is a symbol or design that should represent a brand.

Example brand: IBM, about their brand here
Example logo: IBM, about their logo here

Branding is born

Initially, branding was loosely understood to mean ‘the practice of marking goods and things’.

Industrialisation and the advent of mass production meant that goods produced locally would start to compete with goods brought in from larger producers. This meant the requirement to easily differentiate when acquiring goods became more important. Consumers would start to by the brand over the product and so force producers supplying non-branded goods to rethink.

Very quickly, producers began to use branding to project identity and personality, and so convey a message to the consumer who would begin to make purchasing decisions based on brand qualities, over the recommendation of sellers. The meaning of the word ‘branding’ would start to evolve and continues to do so to this day.

So, ‘brand’ has come to define a broader sense of how one may feel or think about a product, and ‘branding’ is about the set of tools and practices that help generate that feeling or thought.

Logos as part of the visual identity

A logo is one of many branding tools. These tools include a set of values, a sense of how the brand should feel, a story to drive that, a tone of voice to tell the story, and then design to represent that story. A part of that design effort should include a brand visual identity, which is the deliberate process of establishing the brand logo, colour themes, typography sets, and a visual language (a set of design rules to guide the design of any goods, materials, or products).

Logo types

Although logo design is an endlessly creative persuit, it’s interesting to consider well known logos in terms of several generic logo types:

So, the logo represents the brand, and the brand is an ever growing set of meaning.