What exactly is brand?, and what counts and doesn’t count, does Hersheys count as brand?, does Sony count as a brand?, can a company itself be a brand. And what is needed for a brand to be considered a brand?
Edit: I meant like brands in a business way
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A company can be a brand: Hershey’s
A company can own a brand, like Hershey’s owns Hershey’s Kisses and also Reese’s
A company can be a brand that owns more famous/directly used brands: General Motors vs. Chevrolet
A company you don’t hear about can own a brand you know: Kimberley-Clark isn’t super famous, but Kleenex is; Crayola used to be made by Binney & Smith before they wised up and renamed the company to just Crayola
In the modern era, a brand of products will almost certainly have a legally registered trademark, which allows the brand and its owner to protect it against competitors making something that looks similar and confuses the customer. The trademark is usually a name and logo, but can also include other distinctive elements like a particular color or “look.” Basically, if you go to a store, how do you know whether the item you’re buying is the one that you like and trust versus some knock-off. If anybody could sell “Nike shoes” with a swoosh on them, some of them would be the kind you like, trust, and want to buy, and some would be terrible, and you’d have no way to tell. Branding and trademarks are about making it possible to tell.
Kleenex is an interesting one because it’s a brand, meaning a legally registered and protected trademark, but it’s also somewhat “genericized” as a word for a product category, which can endanger the legal trademark status. Nobody says “pass me a facial tissue,” they say “pass me a Kleenex”—even if the facial tissue was made by Puffs or Walmart or whoever. Xerox is another (now maybe dated) example—your photocopier might be Xerox brand or it might be someone else, but “xerox” was/is a common verb or noun for photocopy regardless.
I believe this is why companies put descriptions on the product, like “Kleenex ^(brand facial tissues)”—so they can be clear that this word refers to one trademarked version of this product, not to all of them genetically. They also can file lawsuits and do other defensive actions to protect their brand and trademarks.
(See also: “Is Pepsi okay?” Apparently the Coca-Cola Company has taken legal action against restaurants that serve another cola when someone orders “a Coke.”)
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