A Concert of Brands

Expanding our conception of brands beyond just the commercial ones we see in ads or in the grocery aisle can be confusing. How can we make sense of this expanding universe of brands? How can understanding different and distinct types of brands open up our thinking about how brands work and what new possibilities for them might exist—and how might they help us to make sense of a noisy world?

Most people’s first instinct might be to divide the world into two categories: cultural brands and commercial brands. The first are part of a shared history and heritage freely accessible to all. The second are part of a class of proprietary brands with economic value, protected by the companies that own them.

While this classification might make sense at first, it doesn’t fully account for the nuances of how brands are created, maintained, and used today. ?Brands exist across a spectrum of openness and control across three broad categories.

Proprietary brands

Some brands are created, managed, and owned by a central authority. This may be a business, but it doesn’t have to be—non-profits, communities of interest, governments, and other institutions may all own and manage brands.

Proprietary brands are the protected assets of the organization or community that owns them. The owners may license or permit use of the brand and its trademarks in certain cases, but they’ll step in—often with great fervor—to block unofficial or unsanctioned usage.

Proprietary brands are some of the most valuable intangible assets in the world. According to Interbrand’s most recent Best Global Brands report, Apple remains the most valuable brand in the world, estimated at a staggering $482 billion. This makes it not only the most valuable brand, but the world’s most valuable intangible asset. Microsoft comes in second with an estimated value of $278 billion. The report estimates the total value of the world’s top 100 brands at over $3 trillion. (https://interbrand.com/best-brands/)

Many non-profits and foundations also have proprietary brands of which they can be quite possessive. These brands are often key to fundraising revenues, so protecting brand trademarks is seen as a strategic priority, even when it seems at odds with the organization’s mission. As an example, Susan G. Komen has warned off or sued more than 100 small charities who were using the phrase “for the cure” in their campaigns. It’s also litigated to stop others from any use of the color pink in conjunction with the word 'cure’.

Cultural brands

Cultural brands evolve organically—as if by magic—as the bottom-up output of a collective will. These can emerge from any shared reference; cultural, historical, geographical, or social.

Brands of this kind are an example of ‘spontaneous order’; defined by the 18th Century Scottish sociologist Adam Ferguson as phenomena that are “the work of human action but not …of any human design”. This order results not from the decisions of any governing entity, but instead from the individual decisions of millions or hundreds of millions of people. Think about how language itself develops over time, not as the result of a language committee but through the everyday communications between people. ?

Japan is a cultural brand. No one created it and no one owns it. It’s emerged as a distinct identity as the result of millennia of cultural, linguistic, social, religious, and political evolution. Whether or not you’ve been to Japan, you will have some sense of “Japaneseness” through exposure to Japanese people, food, heritage, arts, businesses, and products.

All nations exist in our minds as brands, each with its own distinct identity. It feels as if these national brand identities have been with us forever, but it wasn’t until the 18th Century that the nation state replaced monarchies as the dominant form of government. This was the moment when the national identities we recognize today began to take shape as the new political structures legitimized themselves by coopting the myths, symbols, and traditions of the people they sought to rule.

And it’s important to note that while nations exist primarily as cultural brands, national and local governments will often make significant investments in advertising campaigns and other place-based brand-building activities to influence the way that their brands are perceived. Campaigns like the iconic I ? NY attempt to manage cultural brands as if they were proprietary.

Open brands

Open brands follow a hybrid path: They’re created by an institution, group, or an individual, but are then developed, maintained, and propagated by fans, adherents, and true believers. It’s the collective attention and engagement of this community that lends the brand its relevance and vitality and sustains it over time.

Our digitally networked world—with the myriad communities of interest fostered by self-publishing and social media—has created rich new possibilities for the creation and flourishing of open brands. These brands have amassed new power and relevance, taking off in politics and activism, culture, technology, and even religious faith. ?

Not all are open in the same way or to the same degree—we see a spectrum of different approaches to how these brands are managed and how open they really are. Some are held closely, almost like proprietary brands, whereas others are as available freely as if they were cultural brands.

Some of the clearest examples of open brands have emerged out of the open source software movement. The creators of these shared software products have needed to develop ways of managing and promoting their brands within distributed and non-hierarchical communities. Generally, they’ve done it by sharing clear principles about their shared mission and purpose, actively engaging their communities with clear communications, and publishing specific guidelines about rights and responsibilities of project participants.

The operating system, Linux, is probably the most successful and well-known open source project of all time. There are hundreds of Linux distributions, hundreds of millions of users, and Linux runs the majority of web servers and supercomputers, as well as providing the foundation for Android, the most popular mobile operating system in the world. To manage that brand, the Linux Foundation offers a free, perpetual, world-wide sublicense to approved applicants (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark). This licensing arrangement allows the managing body of the Linux operating system to control the use of its brand while also opening it to use by any of its approved partners around the world.

Transitive property of brands

No brand is an island—all exist in relation to other brands.?Brands have friends and allies. They have communities. They have nationalities. The relationships between brands have meaning and influence. The equity of one brand can be transferred to another through association.?Brands are constantly borrowing and exchanging both equity and other characteristics from and with other brands.

This is why celebrity pitches, and the modern equivalent of influencer endorsements, are effective. Believing that Taylor Swift drinks Diet Coke or that Beyonce prefers Pepsi, lends both colas an aura of glamour, creativity, and relevance.

We experience this even on the personal level, as individuals seek to gain status from their association with high-status people, institutions, and brands. As the old joke goes: “How do you know someone went to Harvard?” “They tell you.”

But the exchange of brand equity is not limited to simple one-way transfers. Our perceptions of brands are shaped by their position within networks of associations. These networks are massively complex, dynamic, and widely understood. Brands will often cluster together within them in mutually reinforcing bundles.?

If you begin following the equity of one brand, you’ll find that it connects to many others. Bill Gates derived his fame and fortune from Microsoft before lending both to the Gates Foundation. The Foundation was in turn reinforced by Warren Buffet when he joined Bill and Melinda Gates in pledging to donate half of his fortune to it. Recently Microsoft’s own brand, and that of its Bing search engine, have been given a boost by their partnership with and investment in OpenAI, maker of the AI breakout, ChatGPT.

A new world of brand opportunity

Understanding brands within this framework opens up new possibilities for the creation of modern brands. The varieties of brand types and possible brand combinations are expanding. This is directly related to the fact that brands have become software, and in so doing have taken on the aspects of software’s malleability, replicability, and combinatorial potential.

New possibilities for creating, disseminating, and using brands open up new opportunities for invention. For example, it’s possible to imagine new types of branded commons that could support open projects and innovations that would not be possible with traditional company structures and proprietary approaches.

But the new possibilities cut both ways: There’s more brand noise out there than ever before, and it’s harder than ever to get attention from and build trust with people deafened by a disorienting cacophony of brands.