Doing or Being? Branding or Becoming? The debate begins...

Seems there's a budding meta-debate on "what makes a brand?" on some of the blogs I enjoy reading. Kewl.

I've seen John Moore post that "Branding is about being remarkable". Can't disagree with that. But it seems rather passive, rather static. "Branding" is used as a verb in his example, yet it describes a state of being rather than becoming. That may seem like splitting hairs to some, but to me, the most elemental and engaging brands have a "what's next?" aura about them.

Think about the country and the era which birthed the term. Branding evolves from the need to identify a roaming piece of property amongst countless others in the middle of a boundless frontier. It was a way to make sense of things in an obviously dynamic and uncontrollable landscape.

Sound like your life? It does mine.

If that unknown opportunity was a point of pride and a magnetic attraction for people, branding was a way to symbolize and keep order of what you had without resorting to something that was all but impossible and somewhat antithetical to the time and the ambition: a fence.

In this way, I'd view a brand as girding your way for a journey into open range, new horizons, a future. It's a becoming, which begins, of course, from "being". It doesn't mean packing everything including the kitchen sink and grandma's sewing machine, either. Adventures usually demand that we travel light, and bring only the necessities. In this case, for a brand, those necessities would include a sense of what you can do, what you want to do, and where you're going with it all. And who's welcome to come.

That's how Shackleton mythically approached and wrote what is possibly the most powerful ad--one representation of a brand--of all time: