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.

Brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.

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.

In a sense, traditional business is design blind.

Branding is the process of connecting good strategy with good creativity.

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

The central problem of brand-building is getting a complex organization to execute a simple idea.