As noted elsewhere, brand is the public interpretation of personal ideals and shared ideals generate bonds.

The only sustainable manufacture is to pursue and maintain these bonds.

Your product or service is only the enabler, the excuse for connection.

Your ideals are the connective material--those that you and your community agree on and infuse into your organization and product.

Therefore Why you choose to be the organization you do is immensely powerful.

Because ideals and their bonds and the reassurance they provide are the only scarce commodity left in this world.

Plenty of TVs to choose from.

Toothpaste, insurance companies and breakfast cereals, too.

Big shortage of connections.

They are the metaphorical medicine that protects against the rough intrusions and separations that technological change and business progress has foisted on us.

Bonds are the basis for atomic structure, family stability and organizational growth.

They spring from proximity, community, circumstance and sometimes even by choice.

But mostly bonds are accidental, borne of intent, and reaffirmed often through word, deed and process.

And so the purpose of people and organizations and their brands is to place themselves in the way of good fortune and goodwill.

To create pathways for as many of those happy accidents as possible.