"The Secret Power of Brands" is one of the four MOOCs (massive open online courses) that I am currently doing. Very interesting indeed, so for anyone who is looking to learn more about branding, I can only recommend it. As part of the course materials, we were assigned last week to write a short piece answering the following question: To build a successful brand, is it better to control every aspect of the brand, or to encourage people to adopt it and adapt it? Here's how I answered:

In today's era of real-time, in-the-moment, everywhere-and-anytime world of online communications, brands no longer hold control over their reputation. Organisations do indeed control internal activities such as manufacturing, supply chain management, finance and even corporate communications that allow them to ensure expected quality of products and services, but the way their brand is seen and experienced externally is now defined by consumers. As Brian Solis says,

“Businesses are no longer the sole creator of a brand; it is co-created by consumers through shared experiences and defined by the results of online searches and conversations.”

Brands have no physical objectivity. They sell a way of life. The asset of a brand is that dream that exists in the heart and soul of the customer and her experiences of it, shared in the online space.

This is not a typical post for this blog. For the first time, I am not really going to talk about PR, social media, business (in the direct sense) or sustainability. This piece is about one of my other major passions – fashion. I am doing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) called Managing Fashion and Luxury Companies (a great course by the way!), which opened my eyes about the peculiarities of the fashion business and particularly the luxury segment.

So today, I am going to show you some really amazing videos about the uniqueness of luxury products and how heritage, legacy and manufacturing mastery underpin the storytelling of luxury brands.

Before I move on to the videos, here are some key things I have so far learned from the course to help you better understand the meaning and power of these stories.

What makes up the concept of luxury? Three things:

1. Human touch
2. Craftsmanship
3. Excellence

The luxury industry is about value creation, it's about selling a dream, a feeling, an experience non-comparable to another. Luxury brands are therefore required to strike the balance between providing an intrinsic product value (e.g. superior quality, handmade, unique, precious, with extraordinary design, limited) and an intangible element related to it – giving the desired dream effect or special feeling, often determined by the exclusive branding or the aspirational lifestyle that the brand embodies.

In a previous blog post I talked about the art of persuasion and the ethical principles of influence as defined by Robert Cialdni. Today, I want to share with you further important principles from the work of another brilliant man – Dale Carnegie and his best-selling book "How to Win Friends and Influence People". The difference between this post and the one about persuasion is that with the advice from this post you can go a step further – from influencing people to making friends, or in the language of business, from influencing strangers to delighting them into becoming your loyal followers.

I read Carnegie's book a while ago and I've been thinking about how to best present my impressions. He offers valuable advice in the form of well categorised principles and I though it doesn't really make sense to just list them. So I got a little creative and put together an infographic that serves as an ethical guide to human relations and making friends.

Why is that important in your professional life?

As Dale Carnegie says,

"Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business."

What is sustainability? You've got 15 seconds to define it in one sentence! Go! Tough, right?

It's difficult for businesses to describe what sustainability is, but it's even more difficult for consumers to understand it.

Companies have already recognised the value of sustainability to waste and energy reduction, cost savings, increased profitability over the long term and a prosperous future for all of us on our endangered planet, but has the mainstream consumer realised that? Does she see the need to adopt and demand sustainable consumption?

Sadly, I think no.

And that's the biggest barrier for sustainability. The real problem behind making sustainable consumption mainstream is the lack of awareness among people that such products and services exist, and that these are a big part of the solution towards solving pressing global issues such as resource and water scarcity, pollution and waste, carbon footprint, urbanisation etc. I'm not saying that companies don't have an important role here, I am only saying that if companies were facing much stronger demands from consumers for sustainable products, then companies wouldn't have any other choice but to respond to that pressure in a timely manner and transform their business models. If that were so, then the process of aligning sustainability with overall business goals and especially financial strategy as well as embedding sustainability within the entire business, including developing metrics to track progress and tie in with external factors (e.g. environmental costs), would have already been largely adopted. And so would have consumer behavioural and consumption change already been mainstream. It's a viscous circle...

There have been many discussions lately about why the PR industry must evolve and how it needs to change its business model. At the World PR Forum two weeks ago, Anne Gregory urged PR to reach for a higher purpose and stop obsessing with tactics, but to assert its role as a management discipline.

Recently, Richard Edelman proposed that PR should move into a much more mission-critical role – Communications Marketing with communications being a full partner of marketing, beyond just building credibility to becoming the change agent.

But by far the strongest and most inspiring idea I've come across lately is a visual guide by Brian Solis, Vision and Cision and brilliantly illustrated by Hugh MacLeod.

Released just last week, the eBook outlines a new vision for the PR industry to harness technology and deliver business outcomes. It's a manifesto for building relationships in the digital age. And as we know, building relationships is at the very core of PR.

But first, why the need to evolve?