Differentiation through the brand is warmly welcomed among a company’s public, simplifying for them as it does the process of forming a judgment and opinion regarding the offered services. The function of the brand, its reduction of complexity, is all the more important the more confusing and in need of explanation a line of products is. That is why brands are becoming increasingly more interesting on our highly modern services markets, especially for companies with abstract and complex business activities. Although a brand does not shield a company from its competitive struggles, it integrates and binds together all of its competitive advantages into a single good name.

But actual practice passes final judgment here as well. And experience shows that it is not such an easy matter to establish and defend this kind of good name. The Age of Enlightenment mentioned above went hand in hand with the idea of conformism, the adaptation to the collective ideals, schools of thought, management fashion and models. At the strategic level, this adaptation peaked, for example, in the principle of benchmarking. Benchmarking is a good way to anchor technology standards and quality norms, but it is terrible for any form of differentiation. At the communicative level, this type of adaptation expresses itself frequently in the form of interchangeable identities and messages. This is where strategy must mobilize a spirit of resistance and train the power of resistance. This is much more a question of character than one of intellect. We remember Michael Porter: “It’s all about being different.”