Powerful brands in the future will instead carefully choose who'd they'd love to be friends with - and who they'd be comfortable upsetting.

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.

Spinning out of my neuromarketing work where, based on scanning the brains of 2,000 respondents' brains using fMRI, we learned that there's a huge correlation between religion and branding - and thus the way that brands intend to generate customer evangelism are to be constructed.

Big data is great when you want to verify and quantify small data - as big data is all about seeking a correlation - small data about seeking the causation.

In a world where authenticity increasingly is in focus, consumers are seeking more than brands who focuses on revenue - consumers want to support brands with a purpose - one that justifies an emotional engagement.

Placing a wedge of lime in the neck of a Corona bottle helps sell those beers. And where did that ritual come from? One story has it that two bartenders in California were curious how fast a ritual could spread. Astonishingly fast, they discovered.

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.