# Brand Schema: A Product's Brand in Schema.org

> What the Schema.org Brand type is, how to mark up a product's brand, what Google asks for and why a reselling store doesn't put its own name as the brand.

URL: https://clione.ai/glossary/brand-schema/
Lang: en

Open the [JSON-LD](/glossary/json-ld/) of almost any [product page](/glossary/product-page/) and you will find a line like `"brand": { "@type": "Brand", "name": "Photomark" }`. They are two pieces with the same name: `brand`, in lowercase, is **the property** of the product that says what its brand is; Brand, capitalized, is **the type** from [Schema.org](/glossary/schema-org/) that describes that brand. Both are written in English because they are names in the vocabulary. A store should care for a practical reason: the brand is one of the data points a search engine uses to know which exact product is on the page, and in a store that sells other people's products it has an answer that is not the store's own name.

## How it works

Schema.org defines a brand as **a name used by an organization or business person for labeling a product, product group, or similar**. It is not a company: Brand hangs from Intangible, the branch for things that are neither physical nor organizations. Its own properties are few: the logo (`logo`), a slogan (`slogan`), a review (`review`) and an average rating (`aggregateRating`). The name, the website and the profiles that confirm its identity it inherits from Thing, the most general type, as `name`, `url` and [`sameAs`](/glossary/sameas/).[^schema-org-brand]

The `brand` property says **the brand(s) associated with a product or service, or the brand(s) maintained by an organization or business person**. It can be used on a product, a service, an organization or a person, and it accepts two kinds of value: a Brand node or an organization.[^schema-org-brand-prop] That leaves two correct ways to mark up a product's brand:

- **A Brand node with its name**, which is the usual case when the brand belongs to another company.
- **A reference to an organization**, which makes sense when the brand is the company itself: the product points with its [`@id` identifier](/glossary/id-json-ld/) at the organization node the page already describes, instead of repeating its name.

Google asks for it in a specific way. In its [structured data](/glossary/structured-data/) for [merchant listings](/glossary/merchant-listings/), `brand.name` is a recommended property: **include the product's brand in the `name` property of the Brand type, if you know it, and at most one brand name**.[^google-merchant-listing] Its example is the one on the first line of this page, with another brand.

The brand does not travel through markup alone. In [Google Merchant Center](/glossary/google-merchant-center/), the `brand` attribute is **required for every product that has a clearly associated brand or manufacturer**, and also when the manufacturer is the store itself, as with handmade or made-to-order products. It is optional for things without a clear brand, such as movies, books, music or posters. It takes 1 to 70 characters, and the rule for choosing the name is simple: the one people shopping online recognize.[^gmc-brand]

## In a store

A **made-up example**: a photography store that sells other brands' products, compatible accessories and a strap it makes itself. All the brands are invented.

| Product                                                    | Brand that gets marked up | Why                                                                                                                            |
| ---------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Photomark travel tripod                                    | Photomark                 | It is the brand the shopper recognizes[^gmc-brand]                                                                             |
| Battery compatible with a Photomark camera, made by Voltex | Voltex                    | On a compatible product, the brand is that of whoever actually makes it, not the original brand's[^gmc-brand]                  |
| Strap made by the store, with no brand of its own          | The store's name          | Google accepts the store's name when the store makes it, is the only one selling it and there is no official brand[^gmc-brand] |

And this is how the brand looks in the battery's node, with the [manufacturer part number](/glossary/mpn/) (MPN) beside it, because the MPN only identifies something together with its brand:

```json
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": "VX-200 battery compatible with Photomark cameras",
  "brand": {
    "@type": "Brand",
    "name": "Voltex"
  },
  "mpn": "VX-200"
}
```

Photomark appears in the name, because it tells the shopper which camera it works with, but not in `brand`. **The brand says who made the product, not what it is compatible with.**


That a product's brand is the store that sells it, and that putting its name in `brand` across the whole catalog is enough. Google only accepts the store's name as the brand when **the store makes the product, is the only one selling it and has no official brand**; otherwise, the brand is the one the shopper recognizes.[^gmc-brand] The store has its place in the markup: it is the [Organization](/glossary/organization-schema/) that sells, not the brand of what is sold.


## How to check it

1. **Search for `"brand"` in a product page's source code** and see what is inside: a Brand node with its `name`, or a reference to an organization.[^schema-org-brand-prop]
2. **Count the brands.** Google asks for at most one per product.[^google-merchant-listing]
3. **Compare the brand in the markup with the one shown on the page** and with the one in your feed's `brand` attribute. Merchant Center also asks that it be in a single language or script.[^gmc-brand]
4. **Review compatible accessories and replacement parts**: their brand is that of whoever makes them.[^gmc-brand]
5. **Check whether the page qualifies for [rich results](/glossary/rich-results/)** by running the URL through the [Rich Results Test](/glossary/rich-results-test/), and see that the product is detected with its brand, with no warnings about it.

## Related concept: Organization

Brand and [Organization](/glossary/organization-schema/) overlap because a company can have several brands and a brand can share its company's name. **Organization is who; Brand is the name under which that company identifies what it sells.** Schema.org models it this way: an organization can list the brands it maintains with `brand`,[^schema-org-brand-prop] and a product has, apart from its brand, a `manufacturer` property, the maker, which expects an organization.[^schema-org-manufacturer] On most product pages the brand is enough. If yours is a store that makes things, both data points point to the same company; if you resell, neither of them is your store.

To go further, the [Product](/glossary/product-schema/) entry shows where the brand fits among the other properties, the [GTIN](/glossary/gtin/) one explains the third identifier, and the [structured data reading path](/learn/structured-data/) orders the rest of the terms.