How brands outlive the companies that created them

A Brand’s manifestations exist within the smallest fraction of the entity, as also they exist in the complete whole. However, the Brand is always experienced in entirety and it is impossible to perceive any one dimension independent of the others. While it may seem that the Brand exists because of the product, service, organisation or its people, the opposite is actually true – all these exist because the Brand exists. The Brand is immutable and lives on beyond the tangible, physical aspects of the organisation. 

The company may shut down or the product may be stopped from manufacture, people will depart, but the Brand continues to live on. The Brand is actually the only raison d’etre of the organisation. As has been seen, the Brand is almost anything and everything that the entity was, is, thinks and does. Viewed from the dimension of time, a Brand can also be seen as a summation of the entity’s past, present and future. Usually, when the brand is in its conceptual or neo-natal stage, it is easier to see what it represents, the experiences it evokes and who it engages with. As the brand grows and develops wider and deeper engagements, it begins to evolve and mutate. At its mature stage it becomes difficult to realize or even notice the different experiences the Brand induces. The Brand naturally is present in obvious aspects like its experience, price, product, personality, value, and ambassadors. Yet, what really makes the Brand are the often missed facets like the after-sales service, technical support, legal cases (and expected outcomes), perceived quality, how it traverses from manufacture through destruction and other things the entity is or does. 

A few other not-so-obvious impacts of the brand are conversations of its non-consuming audience, attitudes about the brand carried by ‘influencers’. Since the obvious factors are usually accounted for, these non-obvious Brand signals are often the deciding factors in knowing the Brand’s real being. The Brand is present in the minutiae. The brand-meme is the unique regenerative-code that is a part of every cell of the Brand and it needs to be repeatedly suffused into the remotest parts of the organisation to allow the brandsoul to permeate.