Love your brand? Set it free.

The holy grail of marketing is for a brand to become part of the zeitgeist; for people to adopt it as shorthand for something they want to say about themselves but don’t know how to articulate. The brands that have crossed this synapse form something of a visual language in which things, not words, are the units of self-expression. It’s about what the product means, not what it does.

In a post-digital world where nearly everything that brand managers once thought true is now false, the equation for brand transcendence into this rarified universe has remained reassuringly familiar, if increasingly difficult to pull of; holistic marketing that breaks through the clutter.

Those brands that today exist as shorthand – from Polo Ralph Lauren (WASP perfection) to John Deere (rural masculinity) to Obama (progressive change) – did not get there by accident. Their ascent began with someone who fervently believed Product X ought to become Symbol Y within Target Market Z. The visionary then rallied the right team and resources to execute a brilliant campaign that made people believe X really does mean Y.

The paradox is that once a brand becomes part of the language, the very people who gave it meaning – the visionaries, the managers -- are disempowered from managing it. The users define the lingua franca which itself will evolve over time in use. Until the twentieth century, “branding” involved only a hot poker and a scared (and scarred) cow. A language is not a closed system.

Just when your brand finally becomes everything you tirelessly worked for it to be, it slips from your grasp.

You’ve lost control; whether you like it or not.