Share, don't own your brand

Sorry to be grumpy just before the bunny arrives but here's another one of those blog entries dressing up the blindingly obvious as exciting insight which, depressingly, people feel compelled to comment on with breathless excitement. Wow, brands are 'completed' by people and don't exist as fully fledged entities 'created' by marketing departments. Never thought of that one before! But then the entry is on a site called 'own your brand' which I'd argue starts from the wrong premise entirely…you can't, you won't and you shouldn't try.

As far as I'm concerned, brands are and always have been created in conjunction with the consumer and if anyone owns them, they do. The concept of brand ownership is based on what I think is a fallacy of conceiving of brands as 'things' people buy rather than a set of ideas or myths they buy into, or - I'm working on this one - a relationship they build with a particular company's products. Maybe some marketing challenges would have fallen into place quite some time ago (and the 2.0 changes wouldn't have seemed quite so baffling) if we'd stopped objectifying brands and had seen them more relationally…

Anyway, will stop being grumpy on such a sunny day - so happy Easter everyone!