Recently, I heard the CEO of a relatively new company say, “we’ve invested a lot in our brand”. My reaction was to imagine a thin plastic bubble, a veneer slicked up and smooth, surrounding his company.

This may have been unfair. But I get the increasingly strong impression that ‘branding’ is seen as the domain of the marketing department. And I’m not sure this is a helpful view.

A brand, I would rather say, sums up all the interfaces between the business and its environment. It is a high-level way of assessing the ‘meaning’ of the business, or the real impact of its existence.

Now in reality, because these interfaces are so pervasive and so ubiquitous (in other words, they’re everywhere), branding cannot be avoided, and it starts right at the core of a company’s existence. It starts with the personalities of the founders and leaders. It is they who decide, first of all, what sort of business they have, what it considers important, how it operates, what it strives to become, and who they will employ to help them get there.

This is the beginning of brand. It cannot be otherwise, because we cannot reduce our real contact with the world to a marketing message.