How important is Branding and Marketing?

I was wondering, what marketing really does? They don’t build a product. They don’t sell the product. They don’t invest the product. What is it that they really do and why are they necessity?

It is important to follow the chain of thought on this one!

I started a random search for branding and marketing and found a bunch of information at TOP B-SCHOOLS (Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg, Dartmouth, Stanford, etc.). Then there were the TOP MANAGEMENT CONSULTING COMPANIES. A bunch of REPUTED COMPANIES with strong established brands showed up. A list of TOP BRANDS I use and buy.

So what attracted me to the B-Schools, Consultancies and Corporations? The fact that these institutions had set themselves apart from the pack! That leads to two questions, how did they do that? How and when did this pack come to exist?

Obviously these institutions did not build tall buildings or just stick posters all over the place claiming they were the best or give away gifts to all the people on the planet to admit to their supremacy or hold the planet hostage to acknowledge they were the best? So what did they do? BRANDING!

How did this pack come about? The more fundamental question is what are these institutions? To me these are a bunch of very smart individuals current and past associated with a movement. With every movement there are renegades that strive to establish their own style, thus resulting in multiple nucleuses for such movements; thus resulting in a pack of organizations and institutions.

The last question is why a BRAND? With multiple products in the market place and millions of dimensions to measure performance and quality the common man needs a basis. Some time that dimension is just the loudest voice and at other times it needs to be a lot more strategic.

SO THE ANSWER IS BRANDING IS ABSOLUTELY IMPORTANT