Differentiation through the use of brands differs as a principle from differentiation through the use of business objects and processes. Brand strategy is an alternative to conventional economic strategies in the sense of the phrase alter natus = different at birth. Brand strategy aims solely at people and their constant need to decide in favor of or against something. It looks at people in their roles as choosers – no matter when, where, and what they have to choose. The influencing of people’s behavior when making choices is the sole focus of a brand. That is why a brand strategy requires a smaller number of parameters which differ qualitatively as well in comparison with economic models. In consequence, they provide a comparatively higher degree of security concerning the results and a longer-term effect of the results, the basis of their superiority, which always puts on an especially impressive demonstration whenever a brand strategy is used as a comprehensive corporate strategy; a prime example is Apple.

But since the nature of the brand strategy is different from that of the economic strategy, its use does not preclude the parallel application of the latter. Brand strategy is a differentiation strategy which initially leaves all of the other business dimensions open because it goes about its work in a different way: a brand strategy differentiates because it generates differentiated emotions. And these emotions control all of the downstream assessment and opinion-shaping processes in all of a company’s target groups. Brands evoke differentiated emotions which in turn stabilize differentiations in the willingness to behave in different ways. The consequence: pre-judgments which channel and control all of the processes handling the information about a company and its products and services. If a company’s products and services are coordinated with the brand idea, emotion and cognition reinforce each other and establish the long-lasting unique position of a company.

It is highly probable that differentiation by means of brands will gain even further in significance in the future. As material, technical, financial, and informational competitive advantages level off more and more, a paradigm change is imminent: following decades of economic growth measured against quantitative material standards, the pressure for growth according to qualitative emotional standards has built up. The question about the ideal value of what has been achieved is rumbling more and more ominously due to this pressure. This vague rumbling can be heard in many areas of our society and is not something new that has erupted for the first time since the start of the current “crisis”. Conversely, interested observers perceive more and more often situations in which emotional causes have enormous economic effects. For example, people pay more for the “Kelly Bag” from Hermes than for one hundred technically perfect leather handbags from C&A, or the tickets for the Cirque du Soleil cost many times more than what a conventional circus can dream of charging.