Elizabeth (ablereach) has a great thread at Cre8asite on the value of brand building. She notes some figures from a Hitwise study sourced in an article from SEGuide called getting from point A to point B with search.

What Liz is suggesting here is that brand building on the Internet can easily account for more than half of all your referrals and sales, and that as powerful as search marketing is, it's only a stepping stone to true brand awareness and vertical domination. Playing the big boys, even if you're a little, tiny company isn't a bad idea.

Later in the thread, Liz points out that I've been able to brand the term randfish with Google - which gets quite a few searches each month now. The term is so well recognized, that Google's asking if you've misspelled words like randfishh and randfih! Simply amazing...