To the degree a person you address resists reduction to explicit language that person approaches individuality.

To the degree an object resists reduction to explicit language that object approaches art.

To the degree a particular object is loved by a particular person, that object is a gift.

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To the degree that the spirit of an organization defies explicit description, yet in whatever it does or makes the organization is unmistakably who it is, that organization has a brand.

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To have a brand an organization must learn to relate to realities that are not reducible to the explicit. It must learn to recognize these realities, acknowledge them, affirm them, share them, project them, but most of all to be animated by them so they can manifest.

But first, organizations must learn two habits anathema to many corporations: to not kill these realities on sight by insisting they exist as manageable “knowledge” (or surrender claims to existence), and not to try to assemble surrogates of such realities out of pieces and parts (like 99% of brand documentation).

In my experience what is common to the most “corporate” (that is, brandless) corporations is the dominance of a kind of personality who becomes highly anxious, impatient and contemptuous in the face of whatever cannot be communicated quickly and explicitly and subsequently explicitly proceduralized then explicitly measured. (These same brandless organizations can be fanatical about adherence to explicitly defined corporate brand standards. It’s like nervous teenagers who haven’t yet “found themselves”, so they invent and cling tenaciously to formal consistent quirks while carefully following teen culture best practices: fashion. They define themselves by outward appearance. “I’m the emo kid with the pink sling hair who loves xxx.”)

An organization that masters the skill of relating to unmasterable realities will cultivate relationships with actual people (and stop attempting to elicit behaviors from aggregates of attributes), it will learn to create compelling offering (not more impressive specs and a longer feature list), and its offerings will become incomparable (and not merely “competitive”).

An organization that cannot make this leap should stop aping brands and get down to the hard, hard business of competing as a commodity. That means efficiency. Indulging in empty, distracting and ineffectual bullshit is not efficient. Keep the logo; cut the branders.