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In the late 1980s, Sony was what Apple is today: the undisputed king of design, innovation, and cultural status. From the Walkman to legendary Black Trinitron TVs, Sony didn’t just manufacture consumer electronics, it defined modern culture. Everybody had one, and the ones who didn’t have one wanted one. Sony carried the aura of prestige which was earned through engineering excellence, design thinking, and an almost instinctive understanding of what consumers aspired to own. It was also the decade where Japan was at its strongest, and “Japan Inc” bought everything in the US from the Rockefeller center to film studios.
A decade later, much of that position had gone away. The reasons are in a way systematic or maybe exemplary, depending on your view point. Unlike Apple, which moved to seamlessly integrate hardware and software, Sony stayed in silos. Where competitors like Samsung focused almost manically on technology, Sony defended legacy formats, MiniDisc, ATRAC, that the market never adopted at scale, partly because the formats were proprietary, partly because MiniDisc, for example, simply delivered much less quality than Compact Discs yet delivered no real advantage.
And then, when Apple, somehow out of genius, launched the iPod, Sony had nothing to respond with. It chose instead to prioritize digital rights management over user experience. A generation of consumers moved on. Apple launched innovation after innovation, Sony wanted to argue with its customers if you were allowed to play this music on that device. That didn’t work out. Because pumping out cool products and lecturing clients on how to use their tech are well, two separate things.
Of course Sony did not disappear. PlayStation remains a significant revenue driver and enjoys a certain cult status in the gaming community, and Sony’s entertainment divisions have provided meaningful diversification. But the brand’s position in consumer electronics, that sense of cultural leadership, of being the company that defined what premium looked like, has not returned, the former glory never came back. If you have teenage kids, you aren not going to be in a situation where they nag on you to get the latest gadget from Sony, most likely. The lesson is not about technology, more about what happens when a brand loses its point of view. And this happens more often than you think. Or maybe it’s the inevitable outcome for most companies, after a while.
What Branding Actually Is
Branding is not a logo. It is not a color palette, a tagline, or a set of brand guidelines sitting in a PDF that no one reads except the marketing team of the company. Does this mean you don’t need a logo, a color palette or a brand book? No, of course you need “foundations” for your brand. But at its core, branding is the answer to a single question: what do people believe about you when you are not in the room? Do they really lust after your products? For the ones with teenage kids, it’s a pretty good exercise to observe what they think is cool.
Apple understood this mechanism. The apple is the logo is the name, a remarkably clean piece of brand architecture. Shell understood it differently: the logo represents the company and the product simultaneously, in the form of a fossilized shell. Every motorist in the world recognizes it without being able to explain why they trust it. These are not accidents of design. They are the result of decades of consistent behavior, consistently communicated.
Luxury brands have, out of necessity, been the most sophisticated practitioners of this discipline. Why does a customer spend ten thousand euros on a watch when a fifty-euro alternative keeps better time? Because the expensive watch is not primarily a timekeeping device. It is a signal — of taste, of success, of belonging to a particular world. Hermès built that signal over generations. Ferrari built it through scarcity and racing heritage. Both understood that the brand is not what you say about yourself. It is what your product makes the customer feel about themselves.
The Limits of Brand Extension
Every brand has a boundary, and crossing it carries risk. Jaguar’s recent rebranding is an instructive case: in attempting to reposition the brand entirely, the company managed to alienate its existing customer base without yet demonstrating that a new one exists. Whether this was courageous or catastrophic remains to be seen, but the early signals have not been encouraging, and we are leaning towards the catastrophic side of things.
Balenciaga offers a different cautionary note. A strategy of deliberate provocation — selling items that deliberately subverted conventional notions of value — generated significant cultural attention for several years. But attention is not the same as trust, and trust is what drives sustained commercial performance. When the strategy overreached, the reputational damage was considerable and rapid.
The underlying principle is consistent across both cases: brands that chase attention without a coherent underlying position tend to find that attention is a volatile and unreliable asset.
Personal Brand and Corporate Brand
The relationship between personal and corporate branding has become increasingly difficult to separate. Jensen Huang of Nvidia is a useful contemporary example: his consistent personal presentation — including, recently, a leather jacket that sold at auction for close to one million dollars, 980k to be precise — has become inseparable from Nvidia’s identity as a company. The brand benefit flows in both directions. And we would argue that he has become, apart from Elon Musk, one of the most recognizable figures in business.
Now you might be asking yourself why this matters, and why it matters for your business. The era of the invisible executive — the senior manager who lets the corporate communications department speak on their behalf while contributing nothing personally identifiable to the brand — is ending. “Traditional” managers who stay in the background will be replaced by AI. Stakeholders, clients, and talent increasingly want to know who is running the organization and what they actually believe. Generic corporate values, written by committee and believed by no one, do not answer that question.
Real values, the kind that are specific enough to exclude some people, honest enough to create occasional disagreement, and consistent enough to be recognizable over time, are the foundation of both personal and corporate brand authority. They are also, not coincidentally, the foundation of the kind of trust that converts into long-term commercial relationships. Because, when you have a friendship, or if you marry a person, you want to know “what do they really think”.
What This Means in Practice for an SMB
Comparisons to Apple or global luxury houses are, for most businesses, more demoralizing than useful. The scale is different and obviously the history is also different. The resources are different too. But the underlying principle is not.
Authority is built through consistent, specific, credible communication over time. For an SMB, that means resisting the temptation to sound like everyone else in the category — which, in an era of AI-generated content and automated marketing, is a temptation that has never been easier to succumb to and never been more commercially dangerous.
The businesses that are building durable brand positions right now are doing so by saying specific things, taking identifiable positions, and demonstrating genuine expertise in ways that generic content cannot replicate. This takes time. It requires tolerance for the fact that a clear point of view will not appeal to everyone. And it demands consistency, across years, not quarters.
Shocking ads always get attention, maybe you remember Benetton in the 1990s, or Balenciaga more recently. But authority commands respect, and attention fades quickly. Because in the long run, respect is what drives transaction. The question worth asking is not “how do we get more attention?” It is “what do we want to be trusted for, and are we behaving in a way that earns that trust?”
It’s a Long Game
Building a brand, personal or corporate, is not a campaign. It is a commitment. It requires vision, patience, and the willingness to be consistent even when consistency feels unrewarding in the short term. There will be periods where the effort seems disproportionate to the return. There will be audiences that do not respond, positions that attract criticism, and moments where a more generic approach seems easier. Especially smaller companies give up after a few months, or 2 or 3 years, thinking that the ROI is not there.
The full version of this piece, including a deeper exploration of luxury brand geography, the craft traditions of Eastern Europe, and the cultural roots of brand authority across different markets, can be found here (link).
https://theeasternsociety.substack.com/p/on-branding
