Marketing does not create brands.

How many times have you heard from marketers “my job is to create the brands”, (often followed by the “yours is to sell it” when they happen to be talking to sales people)

 Many marketers use it as the rationale for their existence. Pity it is nonsense.

Customer experience with a product creates a brand, not any amount of advertising, promotion, engaging games, and all the rest. At best, marketing creates the environment in which a customer will try, come back to, or stick with a product, but ultimately, it is the experience that creates the loyalty of an individual consumer, and that relationship multiplied many times, becomes the brand.

This simple insight has the potential to change the nature of your marketing significantly, and also enables some sensible measurement of the impact of marketing activity.