What do Harley-Davidson, LEGO, and Apple have in common? They're all based on communities.

Considering LEGO's considerable brand equity, you might expect that the company must have a marketing budget in the billions. Not so. In fact, LEGO's marketing budget is so modest that if I recorded it here, you'd probably think it was a typo. LEGO doesn't do its own talking; it lets LEGO maniacs talk for it.

If marketers could uncover what is going on in our brains that makes us choose one brand over another-what information passes through our brain's filter and what information doesn't-well, that would be key to truly building brands of the future.

The U.S. has dominated and continues to dominate the society and thus products and brands activating fear - and subsequently removing fear are selling substantially better than in other countries.

We're also more affected by aspirational signals in an offline world where it is more difficult to "hide" and thus indirectly increases the influence from others.

Opinion free brands simply will struggle to survive in the future - of that simple reason that we increasingly want to associate ourselves with opinionated and authentic brands.

Here in particular the idea of contextual communication - i.e. communicating the right message, at the right time to the right audience - seems to generate an increasing effect on the consumer in a manipulative way.