In a sense, traditional business is design blind.

When enough individuals arrive at the same gut feeling, a company can be said to have a brand.

A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or organization

Cultures are naturally resistant to change. The same shared mental models that allow large numbers of people to work together efficiently can also keep people from imagining new ways of working together. In many corporate cultures, new ideas are viewed as heresy. But it doesn't have to be that way.

To achieve originality we need to abandon the comforts of habit, reason, and the approval of our peers, and strike out in new directions.

I see "demand creation" as a 20th-century construct that's bound up with advertising. It's an outmoded view of marketing that says, "First, we build a product or service, then we advertise it into people's lives." Embedded this view is the belief that companies control brands. This is a myth. My message all along has been that brands are actually created by customers, not companies. Companies only provide the raw materials - the products, messaging, behaviors - that people use these to create brands.

A brand is a person's perception. Of course, it makes marketers nervous to think that marketing is out of their control, but that's why the discipline of branding has emerged.