Time for a history and economics lesson that’s going to be uncomfortable for any vegans who happen to have clicked this post.

Far removed as most of us are from the messy details of daily food production in the U.S., it’s easy to forget the simple fact that cows are really expensive. Prices fluctuate a bit, but these days a cow head costs around $600. That price tag is actually astonishingly low when you think about it. To get that sale price the hard-working cattle ranchers of this great country have to spend years raising and feeding each animal, keeping them healthy and in top shape for eventual slaughter so we can enjoy a delicious steak whenever our appetites so dictate.

And let’s not forget that even in the not-Jetsons-but-still-tech-heavy world of the almost 2020s that cattle theft is still something of a scourge to the modern-day cattle rancher. Which is why branding irons used to permanently signify ownership of livestock are still and will continue to be a thing for a long time to come.

Cattle rustlers of course are perhaps the quintessential black-hatted villain in American fiction, and the problem that branding marks were a partial solution for. With a rancher’s distinct branding mark scarred into the cow’s hip or shoulder, it was at the very least possible to identify the animal’s ownership if it were recovered from the bad guys.

(Quick aside: At my company The Brand Guys we have adopted a thoroughly post-agrarian definition of the term “brand,” so don’t worry about encountering any red-hot metal when you visit our offices.)

I’ve told you all of that so I can hit you with this: branding was serious business back in the day and is even more so now because of how often modern-day rustlers are trying to steal customers that you’ve spent years cultivating and growing.

Branding in the modern sense means delivering a clear and distinct message to the customer in a way that leaves an impression in their brain and beyond. You need a couple of things to do that well, one of which is a brand identity and message that is clear and unquestionably yours to separate you from every other business in the market.

The other must-have is a delivery method to get those branding messages implanted in your customer’s head so they last and can’t be interfered with by competitors trying to steal “your” people.

Both those steps take time, knowledge, and commitment of proper resources to do the job right so that as your brand evolves – which it will need to over time – it still lands in a way that makes a mark.

Handling your company’s branding wrong and not allocating the proper resources over the long term risks turning your brand into a temporary tattoo: easy, fun, and painless but guaranteed to not last from sunset to sun up the next day. When your branding is handled by experts who know how to sculpt and heat that iron, there’s no question what kind of a mark you’re going to make, and that it will last.

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