Brands are everywhere. Whether it's the Adidas label on your runners or the Cadbury's packaging on your chocolate bar, there's no escaping them.

In fact, for many people - such as those who purchase a packet of Tayto rather than a packet of crisps, or who ask across the breakfast table to be passed the Kelloggs rather than the cornflakes - they are a way of life.

"For many companies the brand is the business and the business is the brand," says Brian McGurk, a partner at Bradley McGurk, a marketing, design and communications group that creates and develops brands for indigenous Irish companies such as RTÉ One and Superquinn Select. "For others, the problem is that they think they have a brand, but in fact they just have a product with a name."

According to McGurk, a brand is uniqueness you know you want and trust. "You only have a brand when people recognise it for what it is and what it stands for, and are therefore prepared to pay for it - when people are aware that it has value for their lives."

Tom Trainer, chief executive of the Marketing Institute, agrees and says that good branding is essential for the creation of a good product. In fact, he can't recall the successful development of any new product in recent times that wasn't accompanied by a good branding campaign.

"Brands today are much more important than they were 10 years ago," he says, adding that in many situations, they are starting to replace traditions as a standard by which people live. "Society is changing and brands are becoming part of the social fabric," he says. This feature is particularly obvious among the younger generation, according to Trainer, who believes that many of the decisions they make are influenced by brands.

Relevance is also key to the development of a successful brand. The more relevant you are, the more valuable your brand will be and therefore, in euro, the more you could expect to receive for it should you decide to sell, says McGurk.

That brings us onto another aspect of branding - the fact that a successful brand is a saleable asset. The more popular and successful your brand, the more it is worth financially and the more credibility it gives to your product.

Add to that the fact that having a successful brand can lead to double-digit sales growth - according to McGurk - and there is no denying that brand creation is an important part of product development and survival.

Still, while creating a brand can be easy, the hard part is sustaining it, says McGurk. This is something he believes that can be particularly problematic in a small state like the Republic.

"The size of Ireland is one of the big challenges of the market, with logistics playing an increasingly important part in any successful branding exercise," says McGurk. "The country is very geographically dispersed and fragmented, which makes it logistically harder to market any product."

After all, it's one thing to create a brand, but another to nurture it and keep it going. Success is useless if it only lasts for 10 minutes, so you have to ensure that if you're going to brand and market a product successfully, then it has to be in all the shops that you said it would be - and on a regular basis. If it is to become successful, people need to be able to rely on it - not buy it one week and then not see it again for a month.

This leads us on to the consumer - after all, it is their purchases that help create the success of a brand. "The changes in consumer awareness of brands has been huge," says McGurk. "Pace of life demands that people have less time to focus on purchasing and brands represent a short cut into purchases."

With employment at an all-time high and more money flowing around the economy than ever before, lifestyle changes such as these have given a boost to brands. "People are cash rich and time poor and they therefore want brands they can buy with confidence," says McGurk.

According to McGurk, over the past 20 years, the idea has moved from product to proposition. Whereas in the past, people would buy a particular product because they needed it, now they will be tempted towards other things because of what they have seen or heard about a particular brand.

In addition to this, brands act as a way of affirming a certain level of wealth and lifestyle options, and in this sense their importance cannot be understated. "Brands are becoming increasingly important in today's society," says Trainer, adding that he doesn't see this changing in the future. In fact if anything, marketers are going to be much more dictated to by the consumer in the future, rather than the other way round as was traditionally the case, he says.

Series concludes