the.com/brand

means A brand is the name, mark, or identity that distinguishes a company, product, or person from its rivals, plus everything people associate with it.

from From Old English 'brand' meaning a burning piece of wood or a torch, rooted in the same Germanic stock as 'burn.' It came to mean a mark made by a hot iron — literally branding cattle to show ownership — and by the 19th and 20th centuries, as manufacturers began burning their own marks onto barrels, crates, and products to prove origin, the word drifted from scorched hide to corporate identity.