O QUE ESTÁ POR TRÁS DA METODOLOGIA BRAND THINKING?

I began my career in branding over 20 years ago, when it was common to dedicate several presentation slides to explaining what branding meant. Interestingly, this still happens, which perhaps makes branding one of the most misunderstood terms in business.

For some, it means visual identity. For others, positioning, naming, a slogan, a brand manual,
or simply what people feel when they think of a company. With so many interpretations, clarity is easily lost. Over time, however, I have come to understand something fundamental: branding has never been limited to expression. Meaningful branding requires strategy. It begins with an organisation’s essence, defines a clear purpose, and aligns identity, intention, and culture.
Yet many organisations still treat the brand as a final layer. Strategy is defined, the product is created, decisions are made, and only then is the brand expected to translate and amplify them.
This is not entirely wrong. But it is incomplete.

A brand is not a layer applied to an organisation. It is a system that thinks, decides, and expresses itself through every choice the organisation makes. This is what led us towards what we call Brand Thinking.
Not as an alternative to branding, but as its natural continuation. If branding structures the brand, Brand Thinking sustains it over time. It moves the brand from expression to decision, from something that communicates to something that guides, and from a project to a continuous system.

Brand Thinking builds on approaches such as design thinking, but its focus is broader. It is less concerned with what to build and more concerned with what an organisation is, and how that understanding should guide everything that follows. To think through the brand is to create a centre of gravity: a point of coherence from which decisions can be made with clarity. It allows an organisation to evolve without losing its direction.

C. G. Jung’s idea of individuation helps explain this logic. Individuation is the process of becoming what one already is in essence. It is not about constructing an artificial identity, but about revealing, integrating, and sustaining one’s nature over time. Applied to organisations, Brand Thinking means maintaining alignment between what an organisation is and how it thinks, decides, acts, and expresses itself.

This is why Brand Thinking does not end when a platform or manual is delivered. That is where it begins.

It gives organisations the tools and criteria to evaluate decisions not only by their effectiveness, but by their coherence. Pricing, hiring, partnerships, products, behaviours, and the way problems are addressed all carry meaning. Everything builds the brand.

At its core, Brand Thinking is about symmetry: the alignment between what an organisation is and how it behaves across every dimension.

Because a brand that truly thinks does not need to raise its voice. It simply needs to be clear, consistent, and fully aware of what it is.