Brand as an intersubjective structure

One question has become decisive in how I understand brands: where does a brand exist?

In the logo? The product? The identity document? The customer’s mind? Employee behaviour? Each answer reveals part of the phenomenon, but none is sufficient on its own.

I understand a brand as an intersubjective structure: a reality formed through relationships among people, organisations, signs, experiences and shared memory. An organisation can propose an identity, but it cannot unilaterally determine how that identity will be understood. An audience does not invent the brand from nothing either. What we call a brand gradually stabilises in the space between these positions and within a wider network of social interpretation.

Beyond the individual mind

Many useful definitions of brand emphasise what exists in a customer’s mind. That matters because a brand without human perception has no social or market meaning. Yet reducing the brand to an individual mind misses its social dimension.

My understanding of a brand is influenced by more than my direct experience. Other people’s accounts, media narratives, employee behaviour, historical reputation, industry culture and the social status attached to a product all enter interpretation. We encounter brands in a world of meanings that already exists before a single transaction.

Two people can therefore have different personal experiences and still share part of a brand’s meaning. This capacity for meaning to become shareable and transmissible is what takes the brand beyond a purely private feeling.

What I mean by intersubjective

In philosophy and the social sciences, intersubjectivity has been used in different ways to describe a world shared among subjects. I bring the concept into brand practice as an interpretive framework, not as a claim that a philosophical theory directly produces a universal law of marketing.

The framework is useful because it allows a brand to be both non-material and consequential. Reputation, legitimacy and many social institutions are not merely physical objects; their power depends on shared acceptance, repetition and collective behaviour. Brands similarly produce real economic and social effects once they enter enough people’s decisions.

A name can alter willingness to pay, reduce perceived risk, attract employees or change how an identical mistake is judged. These effects are not imaginary even though their source cannot be located in a single physical object.

The organisation proposes meaning

If a brand is intersubjective, the organisation does not become irrelevant. Its role becomes more precise. It is an important producer of signals, experiences and decisions. It can articulate what matters, which difference it intends to sustain and how it wishes to be known. I think of this as a proposal of meaning.

A proposal does not guarantee acceptance. An organisation may call itself innovative while the market experiences complexity and unreliability. It may define itself as luxury while people see only a high price. It may speak about responsibility while its conduct supplies contrary evidence.

The distance between proposed identity and perceived meaning is one of the most important spaces in brand work. The distance is not always a failure; no organisation can control every interpretation. The managerial question is whether the dominant pattern of perception has a defensible relationship with the truth and strategic direction of the business.

The audience is not a consumer of finished meaning

People do not receive meaning like a sealed package. They interpret messages through prior experience, need, culture, situation and social conversation. Contemporary research on brand co-creation likewise recognises the role of multiple actors in the formation of brand meaning.

This has an important implication. If meaning is co-created, absolute control is an illusion. But abandoning brand management does not follow from that insight. The organisation needs to create conditions in which intended interpretations have sufficient evidence to become plausible.

Brand management, in this sense, moves from controlling meaning towards architecting the conditions in which meaning can form.

Experience is where identity and perception negotiate

Every touchpoint is a small negotiation. The organisation brings a claim into an encounter and the audience tests it against reality. Delivery promises, response quality, space, sales conduct, complaint handling and even silence in a sensitive moment all become evidence for interpretation.

When these pieces of evidence form a relatively coherent pattern over time, brand meaning becomes more stable. When they repeatedly contradict one another, people rely on other sources and the official narrative loses authority.

Customer experience is therefore not simply a stage that follows branding. It is one of the places in which the brand itself is produced.

Brand identity is not the complete cause of brand

Identity remains essential. An organisation without a definition of itself cannot make coherent choices. But identity is not the whole brand. Identity answers the organisation’s question: who are we and how do we intend to act? Perceived brand is the social and historical response to that proposal.

This distinction improves diagnosis. When market perception differs from intended identity, the logo or message should not automatically be blamed. The problem may sit in the identity itself, its translation, operational experience, audience selection or the social context in which meaning is interpreted.

Brands carry memory

Meaning is not created only in the present. A brand carries its past. An old decision, a crisis, a successful product or years of dependable conduct can remain in collective memory and shape the interpretation of new events.

Brand change therefore never begins with a perfectly blank page. Even a complete rebrand cannot erase memory by managerial instruction. Sometimes the organisation has to converse with that memory: preserve part of it, explain part of it and build new evidence where a different meaning is intended.

Time is one of the materials from which brands are made.

AI adds a new intermediary to brand perception

A further layer is now emerging. Part of people’s encounter with brands is mediated by search engines, recommendation systems and intelligent agents. These systems do not possess human subjectivity, but they increasingly mediate selection and representation.

For me, this does not replace meaning; it complicates the architecture of perception. A brand needs narrative, symbolism and lived evidence for human beings while also providing clear, structured, trustworthy and attributable information for machine systems.

If a system cannot determine who authored an idea, what a company actually offers or which source is canonical, part of the path by which a human reaches meaning becomes distorted. Machine readability is therefore becoming infrastructure for the transmission of meaning, even though it is not meaning itself.

The managerial consequence: brand cannot remain inside marketing

If brands form through relationships and experiences, marketing cannot own them exclusively. People, operations, sales, service, supply chain and senior management all produce the evidence from which meaning is made.

This is where brand philosophy connects with brand governance. An organisation needs clarity about which principles should endure, who translates them into decisions, how conflicts are resolved and which evidence shows whether external perception remains related to internal identity.

A brand lives in the between

The line on the homepage of this site, “Brands live with us and within us,” comes from this perspective. A brand lives within us because without perception, memory and human interpretation it has no social meaning. It lives with us because it is also formed through relationships, conversations, shared experiences and institutions that exceed any one mind.

This understanding limits organisational control and increases organisational responsibility. A company cannot command final meaning, but it remains responsible for the quality of what it contributes to the shared space: the truth of its claims, the quality of experience, the coherence of conduct and the evidence it gives others for interpretation.

A brand is not fully owned by anyone, yet it is not ownerless. The organisation is an important initiator; audiences and stakeholders are co-authors; and time is the context in which some meanings stabilise while others decay.

Theoretical note: My use of “intersubjective” here is an interpretive framework for brand practice. For research on the social and co-created nature of brand meaning, see Tierney, Karpen & Westberg (2016), Brand Meaning Cocreation, and Vallaster & von Wallpach (2013), multi-stakeholder brand meaning co-creation.

This essay connects with Brand Philosophy, Brand Identity and From authenticity to distinction.

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