Although the strategic importance of design for creating strong brands has been known for some time, studies on marketing have neglected to investigate the relationship between design and brand.

On the basis of sign- and cognitive-scientific theories, Robert Kreuzbauer develops an approach to explain the influence of design on brand perception and the storage of brand knowledge. He integrates the latest theories on form perception and cognitive knowledge representation and shows how salient product form attributes (brand identifiers) shape the entire brand. The author also presents a detailed discussion of diverse methods for identifying salient brand design attributes.