If you want to keep your cattle herd separate from the neighboring ranch’s, you might need to do some branding. The website for buying L&H Branding Irons features leathery colors and the slogan “We’ve Got Your Brand” on a homepage where you can buy freeze brands, custom-shaped electric branders, and de-horners.

While this is likely to service your cattle needs, L&H is not very good at branding in the sense that we use the word more often now: the advertising one. Its slogan is uninspired and doesn’t communicate anything meaningful. If you spend some time looking at its wares, you don’t come away with an impression of what the company is about or what sets it apart. The whole point of branding as something advertisers get paid to do is to create a memorable, positive, symbolic identity and sear it onto whatever the otherwise-indistinguishable company is that hired them, so consumers note the symbol and not the meat of the thing. The metaphorical meaning of the word is vivid and based on exactly this: The brand is not any feature of the cow itself; it is a separate thing made by some outside firm such as L&H and seared on.