Consulting firms needed differentiation.
Academics needed publications.
Corporations needed org charts.
MBA programs needed career tracks.

And “brand” needed to pay for all of it.

This is the story of how one word got a hundred jobs, and why most of them shouldn’t exist.

The Word That Launched a Thousand Frameworks

The word “brand” entered English from Old Norse brandr, meaning “to burn.” For centuries, it meant exactly what it sounds like: the hot iron used to mark livestock. Ownership. Identification. Nothing more.

Then industrialization happened. Mass production created a problem: identical products needed differentiation. The word “brand” got its first promotion — from cattle mark to commercial identifier. But that was just the beginning.

On May 13, 1931, Neil McElroy, a frustrated advertising manager at Procter & Gamble, wrote a three-page memo that would reshape corporate America. His problem was simple: his Camay soap campaigns were competing against P&G’s own Ivory soap. The solution he proposed was radical: treat each brand as “a separate business” with dedicated teams, budgets, and accountability.

McElroy’s memo created the brand management system. By 1975, 85% of consumer goods companies had adopted some version of it. The model spread beyond soap. It shaped how Bill Hewlett and David Packard thought about business. It influenced corporate structure for decades.

But here’s what McElroy actually created: an organizational unit. A P&L. A management structure. He didn’t create “brand strategy.” He didn’t create “brand positioning.” He didn’t create “brand architecture.”

Those came later.
And they came for different reasons.

The Vocabulary Explosion

Watch how the language evolved.

1955: David Ogilvy popularizes “brand image” in a speech to advertising executives. He later admitted borrowing the concept from an academic paper published that same year. The advertising industry needed language to sell its services. “Image” provided it.

1969: Jack Trout coined the term “positioning” in an article for Industrial Marketing. He and Al Ries expanded it into a book in 1981: Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. The concept was genuinely useful. It described something real — the mental space a company occupies relative to competitors.

But notice: Trout called it “positioning.”
Not “brand positioning.”
The word “brand” wasn’t attached yet.

1986: Jean-Noël Kapferer introduces the Brand Identity Prism. Another framework. Another vocabulary set. Another thing to consult on.

1991: David Aaker publishes Managing Brand Equity. This is the pivot point. Aaker reframes brand not as a communication tool but as a financial asset. Something that belongs on the balance sheet. Something that can be valued, measured, and managed as corporate property.

1993: Kevin Lane Keller publishes “Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity.” The paper has accumulated over 30,000 citations. It becomes the academic foundation for an entire field.

Mid-1990s: Aaker adds brand architecture terminology: branded house, house of brands, endorsed brands, sub-brands.

Each contribution was intellectually legitimate. Each described something real. But each also created a new domain requiring specialized expertise. New consultants. New MBA courses. New job titles. New billable categories.

The word “brand” started collecting prefixes and suffixes like a magnet collecting iron filings.

Brand image. Brand identity. Brand positioning. Brand strategy. Brand equity. Brand architecture. Brand essence. Brand purpose. Brand personality. Brand promise. Brand experience.

One word. Dozens of jobs.

The Institutional Machinery

Here’s where it gets interesting. The fragmentation of “brand” wasn’t random. It was driven by three interlocking systems, each with its own incentives.

The Consulting Business Model

Consultancies don’t sell clarity. They sell complexity. This isn’t cynicism. It’s economics. The billable-hours model requires continuous engagement. Consultants typically bill 70-95% of their working hours. Utilization rates are key performance metrics. The incentive is to extend work, not conclude it.

More importantly, consultancies need to differentiate themselves from one another. If everyone uses the same framework, no one has a competitive advantage. So each firm creates proprietary methodologies with proprietary vocabulary.

One former brand consultant catalogued the absurdity: “I’ve worked with pyramids, wheels, onions, ladders, bridges, temples, footprints, keys, hourglasses, diamonds, keystones and matrices.”

These models share common underlying characteristics. But each consultancy needs its own version. Its own language. Its own intellectual property. The result? Framework proliferation. Terminology inflation. Complexity creation.

Walter Landor founded his firm in 1941, designing wine labels. By the 2000s, Landor offered “brand strategy, design, naming, brand positioning and architecture, retail environment design, copywriting, internal brand engagement, digital branding and BrandAsset Valuator analysis.”

That’s not scope creep. That’s business model expansion. Each service category is a revenue stream. Each requires specialized expertise. Each justifies higher fees.

Interbrand’s evolution tells the same story. Founded in 1974 for trademark registration, the firm pivoted in 1987 when it developed a brand valuation methodology. The founder, John Murphy, explained the opportunity: “There was a huge buying and selling of branded-goods businesses where what was essentially being bought and sold was brands. But nobody knew how to value brands.”

So Interbrand created a valuation methodology. Then helped develop ISO 10668, the international standard for brand valuation. They wrote the rules for a market they helped create.

Academic research confirms what practitioners suspect: consultants “use sophisticated selling techniques to create unnecessary demand, an ‘addiction,’ for their services from anxious clients.” Solutions that remove uncertainty are “necessarily temporary.” As soon as consultants leave, new questions arise, triggering new insecurity, generating new engagements.

The consulting industry has grown to $330 billion. Brand consulting alone represents $108 billion. The machinery works.

The Academic Publishing Machine

“Publish or perish” has been the academic reality since Logan Wilson coined the phrase in 1942. But the pressure intensified dramatically in the 1990s when journal impact factors became career currency.

By 2006, researchers were publishing 1.3 million peer-reviewed articles annually across approximately 23,750 journals. Yet only 45% of articles in top journals get cited within five years.

The incentive structure is clear: quantity over quality, novelty over synthesis. Creating “new” concepts is more publishable than extending existing frameworks. A study of 234 marketing professors found that research quantity receives too much weight in tenure decisions, while creativity and practical importance are underweighted.

The result is what critics call “salami science,” slicing work into minimal publishable units to maximize publication counts. Doctoral students prefer “the greater certainty of eventual acceptance of empirical work than the risky improbability of the acknowledgment of a theoretical contribution.”

Marketing scholarship specifically entered what researchers call an “Age of Fragmentation,” with documented consequences: an increased focus on methodological rigour over substance, the partitioning of scholars into methodologically defined groups, and research less accessible to practitioners.

Here’s the telling statistic: marketing borrows theories from other disciplines, but other disciplines cite little marketing literature. The field generates more vocabulary than insight.

Each new term: brand resonance, brand salience, brand associations, brand communities, becomes the foundation for more papers, more citations, more academic careers. The terminology expands because the incentives reward expansion.

The MBA Career Track Machine

Northwestern Kellogg pioneered marketing education in 1909. But the post-war boom and P&G’s aggressive campus recruitment established brand management as a standard career track by the 1980s.

Today, virtually every major business school offers specialized curricula in brand management. Chicago Booth advertises preparation for “shaping the future of brand strategy.” Students progress through predictable titles: Assistant Brand Manager, Brand Manager, Senior Brand Manager, Brand Director, VP of Brand, Chief Brand Officer.

One career advisor captured the lock-in: “If you don’t intern in brand management, I’d say it’s almost impossible to get a full-time role.”

The system perpetuates itself. Business schools create specialized tracks. Corporations hire into specific titles. HR departments build career ladders. Recruiting becomes specialized (P&G brand manager to Kellogg’s brand manager). Professional identity forms around titles. Business schools refine their curricula to align with employer expectations.

Analysis shows 87% skill overlap between Brand Manager and Brand Specialist roles. 81% overlap between Brand Strategist and Brand Specialist. These are essentially the same job. But the titles create separate career ladders, compensation bands, and hiring requirements.

Roger Martin, former dean of Rotman School of Management and Monitor Group leader, puts it bluntly: “I know of no business school on the planet that does not have separate marketing and strategy departments.” This structure perpetuates artificial distinctions that serve institutional needs rather than intellectual clarity.

What Actually Exists

Let’s cut through the terminology and ask a first-principles question: What actually exists?

Position exists. It’s the concept you own in someone’s head — proven through decisions, not claimed through words. Volvo owns safety. Not because they say they’re safe. Because decades of engineering decisions, product choices, and capital allocation prove it.

Business strategy exists. It’s every decision you make about where to invest, what to build, and what to sacrifice. These are P&L decisions with structural consequences.

Brand exists. But, not the way most people use the word. Brand is what the market perceives after watching your decisions accumulate over time. It’s an output, not an input. A consequence, not a cause.

Now look at the fragmented vocabulary through this lens.

“Brand positioning” implies you can shape perception by crafting the right message. That’s backwards. You establish a position through business decisions. The brand forms around it.

“Brand strategy” is either a business strategy or it’s documentation pretending to be a strategy. Look at the deliverables: PowerPoint decks, positioning statements, brand pyramids, messaging frameworks, and tone-of-voice guidelines. None of this is strategy. Real strategic choices show up in capital allocation, product roadmaps, organizational structure, what you refuse to do, where you hire and fire.

“Brand architecture” is either business architecture (P&L ownership, investment allocation, organizational structure) or it’s diagram-making. When Alphabet separated from Google, that wasn’t “brand architecture.” It was business architecture with governance, accountability, and risk isolation implications.

The pattern is consistent: attach “brand” to a real concept, and you get either the original concept (business strategy, positioning, business architecture) or you get documentation.

Tesla’s P&L shows billions invested in Gigafactories, AI infrastructure, and vertical integration. That’s why they own “Future” in the market’s mind. The numbers prove the narrative. If Tesla’s financials showed 0% on AI and 90% on traditional manufacturing, the “Future” position would collapse. Immediately. No amount of “brand strategy” could save it.

The market reads your P&L, not your delusional brand strategy deck.

The Three Orders of Damage

The fragmentation of “brand” into sub-disciplines hasn’t just created consulting revenue. It’s caused measurable damage across three levels.

Direct Consequences

On practitioners: Careers built on artificial distinctions. Consultants are defending territory rather than solving problems. Expertise claims in domains that arguably shouldn’t exist as separate disciplines.

On companies: 40% of marketers cite organizational silos as their top obstacle to success. McKinsey analysis found companies with a single customer/growth-oriented role see up to 2.3x more growth than those with multiple fragmented roles (CMO, CCO, CRO). The explanation is intuitive: when everyone is responsible for growth, no one is.

On the industry: A $108 billion market built on terminological complexity. Framework proliferation. Methodology wars. Consultancies competing on vocabulary rather than outcomes.

Downstream Consequences

Confusion between disciplines. Marketing borrows from strategy. Strategy borrows from marketing. Nobody agrees on boundaries because the boundaries are artificial.

Organizational misalignment. One technology CMO described the barrier: “There’s the performance marketing team on one side, and then there’s everyone else, including brand people, on the other.” Brand and performance teams operate with separate budgets, metrics, and vocabularies.

Customers don’t experience your organizational structure — they experience your business.

Frameworks that don’t connect. Brand strategy consultants produce one set of deliverables. Business strategy consultants produce another. The two rarely reconcile. Marketing draws the diagram. Finance runs the business. The mismatch is structural.

Gap between documentation and decisions. Companies create “brand architecture” frameworks, yet their actual business structures contradict them. Positioning decks gather dust while the business makes contradictory choices.

Systemic Consequences

How business education perpetuates the problem. Separate marketing and strategy departments. Specialized career tracks. Curricula designed around titles that shouldn’t exist. Students graduate confused about distinctions that confuse their professors, too.

How career paths lock in fragmentation. Professional identity forms around titles. “Brand strategist” becomes who you are, not just what you do. Defending the discipline becomes defending yourself.

How strategic thinking degrades. 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully. Mismanaged implementation costs companies up to 10% of annual revenue. Brand strategy specifically shows a gaping performance gap: brands worldwide scored only 38 out of 100 points on average for relationship quality.

The most damaging consequence is invisible: opportunity cost. Every hour spent debating the difference between brand strategy and business strategy is an hour not spent making better business decisions. Every dollar spent on framework development is a dollar not spent on actual market research. Every career built on artificial distinctions is a case of talent misallocation.

The Corporate Org Chart Problem

Another driver of fragmentation deserves attention: corporate bureaucracy.

Large organizations break work into smaller pieces. They assign titles and roles to each piece. Over time, people start defending the piece as a distinct discipline — because it’s their identity, their expertise, their career.

The title becomes the territory.

So “Brand Architect” becomes a role. Then Brand Architecture becomes a discipline. Then people write frameworks to justify the separation. Then consultancies productize it. Then business schools teach it. Then more people get the title. The cycle continues.

Here’s the question nobody asks: Was the separation necessary? Or did corporate bureaucracy create artificial boundaries that shouldn’t exist?

Consider what Roger Martin observed: P&G, the world’s most successful consumer packaged goods company, the company that invented brand management, operates without a separate strategy function. Why? Because “marketers broadened their skillsets.”

The work that “brand strategists” claim as a distinct discipline is just… strategy. Done by people who understand customers. The fragmentation serves org charts, not outcomes.

The Critics Who See Through It

Not everyone has been fooled. Roger Martin argues that marketing and strategy “have become the same” job. His recommendation is radical: eliminate the distinction entirely. “The bottom line is that you don’t need both functions in the modern corporation.”

Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow dismissed much traditional brand doctrine as “esoteric quackery.” His research found consumers perceive “very weak differentiation between rival brands, and buy more out of habit and availability rather than commitment and loyalty.” Time spent on brand “personality” frameworks is “time wasted.”

Mark Ritson delivers the most colourful critiques. On the proliferation of terms for identical concepts, he wrote: “When a discipline does not use a unified vocabulary, it makes us look less rigorous and a bit silly. We also confuse the fuck out of new marketers.” His proposed solution: “I propose we kill concepts and pick a winner. Let’s do it because it makes for an easier, more intuitive discipline.” On methodology wars between consultancies, Ritson is blunt: “Don’t call it science, call it what it really is: consulting, dogma, ideology.”

Les Binet and Peter Field’s effectiveness research provides empirical evidence against fragmented thinking. Their core finding, that brand building (60%) and sales activation (40%) work together, challenges the organizational separation of brand and performance marketing. The most important word in their framework title, The Long and the Short of It, is “and.”

These critics share a common insight: the fragmentation serves providers, not clients. It creates complexity that justifies fees, not clarity that improves decisions.

What To Do About It

If you’re a CEO or founder, here’s the practical translation:

Stop commissioning “brand strategy” as a separate workstream. If you’re making decisions about positioning, you’re making business strategy decisions. Treat them that way. Put them in the same room as capital allocation, product roadmap, and organizational design decisions.

Be skeptical of framework proliferation. When a consultant presents a proprietary methodology with proprietary vocabulary, ask: What does this tell me that simpler language wouldn’t? If the answer is “nothing,” you’re paying for complexity, not insight.

Look at your org chart. Do you have separate people for brand strategy and business strategy? Separate teams for brand marketing and performance marketing? Ask why. The answer might be “historical accident” rather than “strategic necessity.”

Test your positioning against your P&L. Whatever position you claim to own, does your financial structure prove it? If you claim to own “innovation” but your R&D spend is below industry average, you don’t own innovation. You’re just claiming it.

Collapse the vocabulary. Position. Business strategy. Brand (as output). That’s it. Everything else is either a subset of these three or it’s documentation.

If you’re a consultant or practitioner, the implications are harder:

Acknowledge what you’re actually selling. If you’re helping companies make better business decisions about how they’ll be perceived in the market, call it that. Don’t wrap it in proprietary frameworks that obscure rather than illuminate.

Resist the incentive to complexify. Your business model rewards the creation of new concepts, frameworks, and vocabulary. The client’s interests don’t.

Integrate rather than specialize. The most valuable advisors are those who can connect positioning to business model to capital allocation to organizational design. Not those who’ve carved out a narrow specialty in one fragment of what should be unified thinking.

The $108 Billion Question

The brand consulting industry is worth $108 billion. The management consulting industry is worth $330 billion overall. MBA programs graduate hundreds of thousands of students annually into specialized tracks. Academic journals publish millions of articles, creating ever-finer distinctions.

All of this machinery continues operating because the incentives that created it remain unchanged. Consultancies need differentiation. Academics need publications. Corporations need org charts. MBA programs need career tracks.

The question isn’t whether “brand positioning,” “brand strategy,” and “brand architecture” will disappear from business vocabulary. They won’t. Too many careers depend on them. Too much revenue flows through them. Too many institutional structures are built around them.

The question is whether you, as a leader, as a practitioner, as someone trying to build something that matters, will let the vocabulary confuse you.

Position is what you own in someone’s mind.
Business strategy is the decisions you make to prove it.
Brand is what the market concludes from watching those decisions.

There’s no additional $108 billion in complexity required.

The word “brand” started as a mark burned into cattle hide.

Simple. Functional. Clear.

Maybe it’s time to remember that.

Everything you need to know fits in one sentence: Your business is your brand, proven through decisions, not claimed through decks.

P.S. This whole article reminds me of Joey from Friends explaining a “moo point,” a cow’s opinion. It doesn’t matter. It’s moo. Which feels appropriate given that “brand” literally started with cows.

Brand strategy vs. business strategy? Moo point. Brand positioning vs. positioning? Moo point. Brand architecture vs. business architecture? Moo point.

The cows had it right all along. They just stood there, got marked, and let the market decide who owned them.

$108 billion later, we’re still overcomplicating it.