“The first mistake is assuming you control your brand.”

Not anymore, anyway. A good friend of mine in the advertising industry pointed this out to me recently.

Today, your brand is the aggregation of a thousand points of view. With regard to consumer goods and services this has long been the case, but until recently it wasn’t possible to really sense these points of view, so we confuse brand with artifacts: full-page advertisements, Super Bowl commercials, and billboards. After all, in its original use, a brand was a symbol literally burned into an object.

So, a while back I started an experiment. On all of the forms and profiles that I complete online, I’m supplying a Google query as my home page. Rather than attempt to tell you who I am by pointing you at a carefully crafted web-site, I’m using Google’s page rank, and the links you’ve created to my artifacts, to tell you who these thousand points of view think I am.

I realize, I open myself up to “miserable failure” style manipulation of the system, but then, isn’t that in its own way reflective of the brand?

Todd AKA http://www.google.com/search?q=todd+sundsted