Every argument about brand has assumed a background condition that no longer holds: that making things is expensive.
Because production was costly, output was evidence. A firm that published a well-made catalogue had spent money to do it, and the spending was itself a signal — of seriousness, of permanence, of having something to protect. Advertising theory has a name for this: costly signalling. The message mattered less than the demonstrable fact that sending it was not free.
That background condition has now gone. Text, images, video, product descriptions, technical documentation, customer testimonials in convincing prose — all can be produced at a marginal cost approaching zero, in volume, in any language, at any hour. The signal has been severed from the cost.
What becomes scarce
When a resource stops being scarce, value moves to whatever is scarce next. Content is now abundant. What remains scarce is the reason to believe any particular piece of it.
This is not a rhetorical flourish; it is an observable shift in where customers spend their attention. Faced with fifty product pages that read equally well, the decision cannot be made on the pages. It is made on something outside them: who is saying this, what happened to people who believed them last time, whether there is anyone to hold responsible if the claim turns out to be false.
That accumulated answer is what a brand is. Not a logo, not a tone of voice, not a positioning statement — the aggregated record of promises kept, held in the memory of a market. It is the one asset that cannot be generated, because it is made of elapsed time and honoured commitments, and there is no way to produce either quickly.
Reputation as infrastructure
The consequence is that brand moves category. It has been treated, in most organisations, as a communications asset: something the marketing function manages, refreshes periodically, and expresses through campaigns. Under abundance it behaves instead like infrastructure — the substrate that makes every other transaction possible, in the way that a payment system or a legal contract does.
Infrastructure has properties that communications assets do not. It is expensive to build and cheap to maintain until it fails. Its value is invisible while it works and total when it stops. And it is not owned by the department that speaks about it: every function that touches a customer either deposits into it or withdraws from it, usually without noticing which.
A support agent who resolves a complaint honestly is building brand. A growth team that ships a dark pattern is spending it. Neither would describe their work that way, and the accounting that would let them see it does not exist in most firms.
The asymmetry
Trust accumulates slowly and collapses quickly, and the asymmetry is not a moralism but a structural feature of how evidence works. A thousand kept promises establish a probability. One broken promise establishes a possibility — and possibilities, once raised, are not retired by further good behaviour, they are only slowly outweighed.
This is why the arithmetic of short-term optimisation goes wrong so reliably here. Each individual erosion is small, defensible and profitable: a slightly overstated claim, a subscription made hard to cancel, a review incentivised rather than earned, a synthetic testimonial that is only lightly synthetic. None is a scandal. Together they are a withdrawal from the only account that cannot be topped up on demand.
What follows practically
If credibility is the constraint, then the marketing questions change shape. The question is no longer how to say something more persuasively; it is what one can say that a competitor could not say without lying. Verifiable claims outperform superior ones. Specificity outperforms strength — a number that can be checked does more than an adjective that cannot.
It also changes what is worth protecting. Firms have generally been willing to trade a little reputation for a measurable gain, because the gain appears in the quarter and the reputation does not appear anywhere. In an environment where reputation is the scarce input, that trade is not a trade at all. It is selling the machine to buy the output.