How Should We Talk About Brand?

I like the idea that brand is expression of unique value in marketplaces. This implies that undifferentiated value lacks brand.  We can also talk about emerging, weak, stable and strong brands. This applies to a brand of a solopreneur, small business, non-profit, large corporation, community or region.

Branding folklore has it that strong brands comes from innovative deliverables, innovative systems or innovating markets. Ultimately, they occur at the intersection of choice and chance.

I would argue that brands are as strong as the questions work from. Strong brands are shaped by asking different questions. Organizations with no brands are asking how they can secure their future in maintenance of continuities, committing to be more like themselves. Weak brands ask how they can compete in the sense of being better at the same as everyone else.

Strong brands work from new questions about the possible impossible, what no one is asking their markets and what's emerging in new technologies and organizational models.