Steve McKee, the founder of McKee Wallwork Cleveland, BusinessWeek advertising columnist, author of When Growth Stalls, and friend wrote recently here about branding and how the tide has shifted. He says you no longer control your company’s brand; your customers do.

Think about that for a second. You no longer control your company’s brand; your customers do.

It used to be that the big, Fortune 500 companies would spend millions of dollars on fancy advertising and huge global PR campaigns and years and years and years to tell their customers and prospective customers what they wanted them to think about the brand. If someone was happy with the product or service, they wouldn’t tell anyone. If they were unhappy, they’d tell five to 10 people and hope to get attention through a nastily written letter to the CEO that almost always went unanswered. (more…)