Post 1

I’m very pleased to see you discussing brands in terms of brand-marks. Perhaps I can offer a more in-depth handle on the marks of brands for your further consideration.

I put it to you that every aspect of a brand can be captured, determined, mediated and managed in a system of brand-marks (or Brand Marks). This includes every ‘thing’ or event that can be experienced by those who have contact with the brand. In order to achieve this the types of marks of a brand are qualified as material, linguistic and gestural, outside of which there cannot be any other material to measure, handle or experience.

While I appreciate the gist of your argument I think you’ll find that it requires a high level of appreciation for philosophy and the philosophical process, and that you risk never bringing your message to market in an accessible manner. I believe that by branding a distinct language-space such as the ‘Brand Marks’ language I have proposed you’ll have a better chance. I also believe that thinking about brands in terms of brand-marks is a simplification of what you’re attempting without any loss of content.

I’ll be more than happy to expound on any of the points I’ve made. Perhaps you can assist me in ironing out any problems and refining the brand-marks language even further.

Post 2

I’m very sympathetic to your metaphysical approach to understanding brands. It’s not difficult to argue that brands are entirely metaphysical and that material things are not material in the sense that is generally assumed. However, such a view and, perhaps, this ‘perdurance theory’ your refer to is likely to have a limited impact on how brands are created, maintained and experienced, particularly in a non-academic and commercial context. I appreciate understanding objects and entities as 4D ‘things’ but I have to ask the rhetorical question, ‘so what?’.

I suspect that in a metaphysical argument about anything you will find conflict with material or object-based thinking systems such as a 4D world. Each approach appears to be useful up to a point but the chances are that neither will offer a complete framework against which to measure the value of things.

As I trust you noted the brand-marks system I’ve proposed is qualified as material, linguistic and gestural, outside of which no other types of ‘material’ can be expressed or shared meaningfully. I write ‘material’ because my argument is that gesture can be marked sufficiently to qualify as a type of material with distinct substance. This kind of argument works in reverse too. For example, any material object can be pursued into non-existence relative to what most people assume to be the conditions required for any object to have material substance. And, such a view indicates a likely limit for your metaphysical approach as well as the ‘perdurance theory’.

But, it’s not even necessary to go this far philosophically to appreciate that most of experience is covered by gesture alone. The rest of experience is taken up in combination with physical material and linguistic marks. These are the ‘marks of experience’ and because we can articulate these marks in language (language is itself made up of marks) we can brand the experience, hence brand-marks. Such a system of brand-marks can meet the requirements of any other system, metaphysical or other but it is particularly suited to handling brands.

What constitutes a brand is not as difficult as most people assume. It’s really simple in my mind. A brand is any discrete entity. All that varies between brands is complexity, scale and efficacy. The experience of which can be captured, determined, maintained, mediated and extended in a system of brand-marks.