So you've picked a name for your company, your product or that service you want to offer. Perhaps you even had a custom logo – a graphic of some kind – designed to enhance that name. You've also decided on a tagline you want to use with that name. You know, three, four or five short words to help explain how your company, product or service benefits your potential customers.

Put that all together and you've created a brand, right? Wrong! Those are merely representations of a potential brand.

If together those three items don't make a brand, then what does? Though you can name your company, your products and your services, getting any of those names accepted as a "brand" is, for the most part largely out of your control. So then how is a brand created? And who or what actually creates it?