What's the difference between Brand and Organization in Schema.org?
Usually Organization
represents a company itself (school, NGO, corporation, club, etc.) whereas a Brand
represents a product or service. In many cases these may be the same, e.g. Adidas; but not always, e.g. Tylenol, a brand sold by the organization/company Johnson & Johnson.
So, which you should use depends on what you're writing about. If you are selling Adidas shoes then Adidas is the Brand
, but if you're writing an article about the company's profits then Adidas would be the Organization
.
The difference might become clearer for cases where the organization name is not identical to the brand name.
For example, consider the company Lenovo (Organization
) which owns the brand ThinkPad (Brand
). A specific ThinkPad product (Product
) manufactured by Lenovo could be marked up like this:
<article vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Product">
<h1 property="name">ThinkPad X60</h1>
<div property="manufacturer" typeof="Organization">
<span property="name">Lenovo</span>
</div>
<div property="brand" typeof="Brand">
<span property="name">ThinkPad</span>
</div>
</article>
If you want to display both, the manufacturer and the brand, you could of course use the same structure also in cases where the organization/manufacturer name is identical to (one of) their brand names. Albeit named the same, a brand and its owner are still separate entities.
To prevent the visible duplication, you could use meta
/link
elements to hide one of the instances (in the case of JSON-LD, this is not relevant, of course), or you could consider using both types together (but that might be problematic, depending on syntax/consumer).
If you want to provide more data about one of these entities, you have to consider what exactly you are talking about. For example, a Brand
can’t have a PostalAddress
etc. Given that the Brand
type has only few properties defined, you can’t provide that much data about it anyway.