Eliminate marketing.
Stop all brand building.

Sounds crazy?

What if the very act of trying to build a brand is what’s destroying it?

The science of emergence tells us something profound about complex systems. From consciousness to colonies, complex patterns emerge from simple rules and interactions.

As Nobel laureate Philip Anderson noted, ‘More is different’ – you can’t reduce emergence to simple cause and effect.

Brands work exactly the same way.

But here’s what’s even more fundamental: Positioning isn’t a marketing function. It’s not owned by your CMO (who, data shows, has the shortest C-suite tenure at 40 months). It’s the atomic core of your business strategy, meaning it can only be owned by the founder or CEO.

In his work on System 1 thinking, Daniel Kahneman explains that brands exist in the automatic, unconscious part of our minds. You can’t engineer unconscious perception directly, but you can create the conditions for it to emerge.

Consider Microsoft under Satya Nadella.

He didn’t launch a brand repositioning campaign. Instead, he fundamentally shifted business strategy from ‘Windows first’ to ‘Cloud first, mobile first.’ The brand followed naturally.

The quantum physicist Richard Feynman once said, ‘The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.’

Similarly, when you think you can delegate positioning to marketing, you’re fooling yourself about what positioning is.

Heck, Steve Jobs intuitively understood this: ‘We don’t spend time talking about the brand. We spend time talking about how to make the best products in the world and how to make the best experience in the world.’

Then he added something that aligns perfectly with complex adaptive systems theory: ‘People that run around worrying about their brand all day long instead of worrying about their products maybe don’t get what they want.’

Charlie Munger’s mental model of ‘inversion’ is relevant here: Instead of asking how to build a brand, ask what prevents a brand from emerging naturally. Usually, it’s the very act of trying to engineer it.

As Nassim Taleb explains in his work on antifragile systems, some things strengthen from stress but weaken from active intervention. Brands are similar – they grow stronger from authentic business decisions but weaker from artificial ‘brand building’ efforts.

Here’s the truth that complexity science validates:

• You don’t need brand strategy.
• You don’t need marketing strategies.
• What you need is clear positioning driving excellent business strategy, executed masterfully.

That can only come from the top.

Because when positioning drives every decision – from product development to customer experience to company culture – the brand emerges naturally.

Like consciousness from neural networks. Like patterns from complex systems. Like trust from consistent action.

Stop trying to build your brand.
Stop delegating positioning to marketing.
Start owning the concept that drives your business.

As the Gestalt psychologists discovered, the whole emerges from the interaction of parts in ways you can’t engineer directly. Your brand will do the same.”