Your business does not have a brand; your brand has a business. That may sound odd, backward, even heretical, but it’s true.

Consider the smartphone on which you may be reading this. When it was fresh out of the box and had gigabytes of memory to spare, it weighed roughly 6 ounces, depending on what model it is. Today, loaded as it is with emails, apps, phone numbers, and an encyclopedia’s worth of other stuff, it weighs the same 6 ounces. Why? Because while your smartphone is material, the ideas represented on it are not. Ideas have no mass; only the expressions of them do.

Your brand, your company’s positioning and the reputation it has earned, is an idea. It’s information. But your business, how you actually go about delivering products or services to your customers, is material. And material things decay. That’s why the key to longevity is continually realigning your business to your brand, not vice-versa.

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