It's unbranded—add a logo..now it's "branded"

I was recently challenged to defend my reasoning of why a proprietary unbranded interactive program was designed "unbranded". Further questions delved into what it would take to "brand" a interactive program such as this. This led me to a discussion of branding in general...

A brand is the accumulation of perceptions in the mind of a consumer. Sometimes people say brand, when they really mean : logo, graphic design, packaging or ad campaigns....these are just the things that factor into the "accumulation of perceptions" that becomes the brand.

The brand is built through the total experience it offers, and in this case there is a hard line between a branded and unbranded project. Since effective branding is about the experience and memorable value derived from that particular brand—not just instant information, and the nature of this particular program was "information" , and the educational derivitive of that information, supported by peer perception, key opinion leaders and clinical evidence.

Simply injecting an "accumulation of perceptions" into an interactive program that is based on evidence, would seemingly conflict with, or possibly negate—such a source of trusted information—hence possibly working against that brand. On the other hand if the expectation of such a program is that the information is being derived from the brand, encompassing all the perceptions that that particular brand stands for...whell, then creating it in a "branded" fashion would undoubtebly aid the objective of the program, and it's approach in design and development should be optimized to support a "branded" strategy.