Brand
The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.
Peter Thiel • Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

Consumers, too, have become more aware of the mechanics of brand-building. As a result, companies are under pressure to simulate authenticity by leaning into more personalized forms of communication.
Vox • Brands want to be more than your friend. They want community.
To systematically build iconic brands, companies must reinvent their marketing function. They must assemble cultural knowledge, rather than knowledge about individual consumers. They must strategize according to cultural branding principles, rather than apply the abstracted and present-tense mind-share model. And they must hire and train cultural a... See more
Douglas Holt • Branding as Cultural Activism

the objects we love most develop their own mythology
things hold memories!!
Building a winning community-based brand is the process of being laser focused on a group of people with a shared identity, and developing something for them that makes them feel heard. Elements include establishing an identity that sparks excitement, using a shared language, creating s ocial content that makes them want to share yet feels aestheti... See more
Greg Isenberg • The Fast-Foodification of Everything

“A good strategy is, in the end, a hypothesis about what will work.”
— Michael Porter