Branding, and particularly brand equity, often get a bad rap in companies, most especially in the marketing department. But they shouldn’t. They're one of the most powerful aspects of a business that can have a dramatic impact on a company’s bottom line. I can’t tell you how many companies I’ve worked for that made phenomenal products and were marketing those products well, but paid absolutely no attention to their brand or treated it as some icky thing that dinosaur marketers cared about before the advent of digital marketing.