Evan Baines
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1. Definition of Branding
Your "brand" is a psychological construct that exists in the mind of consumers that reflects all of the information and expectations that they have for your product or service. This brand image is created as the sum product of all communications and experiences that the consumer has with your firm. "Branding" is the activity of actively seeking to control and cultivate that image to improve sales. Branding is NOT the same as Marketing. It is possible to cultivate a brand without ANY active marketing efforts.
2. How Does One Go About Branding?
You are already creating your brand, whether you know it or not. Anything that you do or fail to do that can communicate with consumers creates your brand. As photographers, even the simple act of choosing which images to feature on our websites or in our presentations contributes to our brand. To those of you who say that it is "all about the pictures," that is still a branding strategy!
In addition to the factors that you have been discussing such as logos and music, branding may include:
The images you choose to display
How you choose to display your images
How you talk about your images
Any efforts at educating the client about your quality
In what product form do you offer your images for purchase
You may have noticed that I labeled my adjectives exercise as a branding exercise. I believe this is accurate: you can create an impression of your work and style with only the first few images that potential clients see, and those of us who are actively working on our branding make a conscious effort to communicate something cohesive about our overall portfolio with those first few images.
Branding may also include less-obvious aspects of the consumer experience such as providing a nice pen to sign a contract, or meeting in a studio, an upscale coffee shop, or McDonald's. Branding is the clothes you wear to your meetings, or the packaging of the products you deliver at the completion of your contract. You may deliberately avoid "dressing fancy," having a swanky logo, creating an elaborate website and so on because you want to be judged for your work and not your marketing. In this case, you are now actively working to cultivate the brand of being a serious artist who is above "branding." 
3. The Importance of Branding to Photographers
Sensory transference is a phenomenon by which human beings may transfer sensations created by packaging to the product itself. It is well documented that in taste tests, more attractive packaging can cause a taster to actually give better scores to the FLAVOR of a product if the packaging is on display. You can read more about this here:
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/08/13/malcolm-gladwell-on-the-power-of-marketing/
The same concept holds true for our images. I have no doubt that a consumer will "rate" images superior if shown on a beautiful, professional website, and mark them down if poorly presented on a cobbled-together page. In fact, your brand as a whole (reputation, business name, logo, website, marketing materials, use of social media, etc) can influence how consumers judge the quality of your work.
There is a prejudice that has been expressed in this thread that any branding or marketing efforts are by-definition an attempt to make our products and services look better than they are, or to "put one over" on customers. This is one approach to branding, but one that I don't believe is a viable long-term strategy. A big part of my branding efforts involve educating clients, rather than manipulating their ignorance.
For instance: a true hands-off documentary approach is what I consider the most important aspect of my wedding coverage. While I do create some posed images, I consider the documentary work to be my focus. However, the average client frequently cannot tell the difference between a loose, contemporary editorial portrait with competent posing and a true hands-off documentary shot when reviewing portfolios (of course they will know the difference when they are the ones in the pictures!). The manufactured portrait will almost always be "prettier" than true documentary work, so it's up to me to educate the client on the value of capturing real moments as they happen, and how to tell the difference between those and staged portraits.
In summary:
The act of branding is the careful consideration of any vector by which a consumer might form an image of your business or work, and the intentional adjustment of these vectors to ensure that the desired impression is created.
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