A brand exists for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most important of these is to develop a psychological relationship between a person and a product. Every brand does this. From the beginning of branding straight up to the not-too-distant past, the way that brands worked was to build consumer confidence through repetition: by providing stylistic consistency, brands reassured customers that the products under their umbrella were similarly consistent in quality (and therefore trustworthy), and thus eventually became symbols for contracts regularly fulfilled. By employing advertising to regularly alert potential customers to the various products and services a brand represented, brands became part of the wallpaper of American life in the form of billboards and television and magazine advertisements. It was a pretty good strategy for quite a long time, but then along came the Internet.

"A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it..." — Andy Warhol

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On Saturday, I proposed something to ponder over the weekend. Namely, I suggested that we all think, over the weekend about the possibilities of a brand and design strategy that takes into account multiple degrees of control, in the various registers of user experience.

This is a deep and complicated question, and whatever strategies will be used to resolve it will likely involve brand strategies that are downright alien to the ones we know today. Why this might necessarily be the case, I thought, may give us some deeper insight into moving forward on this difficult problem. After all, diagnosis is one thing, treatment is another.

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