Difference between Brand (noun) and Branding (gerund?)

I am writing for marketing client. Goal is to clearly define difference between the two terms. A BRAND (noun) is the collective set of perceptions existing about a company in the larger world. BRANDING is the actions a company takes to influence those perceptions. Is Branding simply a gerund in this case? That seems less, uh, active than the situation requires.

In advertising marketing a brand is something you can point to such as a company and/or their product. Branding is about how you go about PROMOTING the brand by marketing and advertising.

Understand that "brand" originates from cattle branding and the like, where the owner's mark was burned into the hide of the animal.

The original meaning of "brand" in commerce was precisely this owner's mark -- a trademark emblem or phrase, applied to (printed on) all the products produced by the mark's owner. Thus Kellogg's prints a large, stylized "K" (or the stylized word "Kellogg's") on all of their breakfast cereal products -- that's their trademark or "brand".

This concept was then expanded to mean the "aura", as it were, surrounding the products bearing that brand. Eg, Chevrolet and Ford both attempted to produce impressions of their automobiles as being made for "real people", whereas Cadillac and Lincoln (brands, oddly, from the same companies producing Chevrolet and Ford) sought to produce impressions of luxury and exclusivity. These impressions became part of the conceptual "brands".

"Branding" (when not applied to livestock) thus means the development (or, often, fabrication out of thin air) of not just an emblem but the set of impressions that that brand is expected to represent.