Not to give an SEO answer to a PPC question but it does "depend".
There was a tweet that got this idea started but you can find it and some of the responses here at Why Bidding On Your Brand Name is Important . For more fun may we suggest you hit up Google or Bing for more posts that say YES or NO or DEPENDS from many sources and dating back many years.
As so often with all things there is no easy answer or "best practice" that applies to all - at least we don't believe so and here is why:
What is Brand Bidding?
Brand bidding simply means paying to have an ad appear above your (hopefully) first organic listing in Google or Bing. This could be say a misspelling of your brand, certain products you sell or maybe your CEO's name.
Defensive PPC Bidding
To quote Ryan Jones - " Done this test too. bidding on your brand is always better -except when not doing it means that Google shows 0 ads, and you rank #1. " The idea behind this is to constantly monitor your brand and product names and watch for people bidding. When you see them then do it to be defensive. Or just always keep ads up as a defensive play.
Offensive PPC Bidding
There are number of reasons to go for it - to take up more real estate, to push a new product, to push a new campaign, to push people to reviews or high converting pages.
There are many other ways to try and funnel users such as overcoming customer service issues, have a recall and want people to get to a specific page, and this is just something you should test.
Look at the ROI. Period.
As Martin MacDonald points out, it really is about the ROI. He puts it best with " Bidding on your brand term, every time, was the ROI winner."
PPC Brand Bidding Case Study
As we said on the Podcast there would be an extra case study resource and we actually found a somewhat recent one!
What Happened When We Paused PPC Brand Campaigns
Bonus Bidding Example
As we said on the show there would be another example or two in the write up and here is one from LinkedIn that is pretty recent. To dig into the comments deeper do go here and you will see a lively discussion.
An even more recent example since we recorded was Jason Fried taking issue with Google allowing other companies to bid on Basecamp's name. His initial tweet where he took issue is here.