Got me thinking again, thanks Jack.

Are brands static or dynamic?

When I serve large corporations (especially in my past as an internet business strategist) they tend to calcify their brands. They like static I suppose because they liked control.

But is it not both/and? Brands have static unchanging cores perhaps. Values and vision might be considered the unchanging aspects of a brand. But they need to grow and expand too. But how? Especially when many companies are suffering from “hardening of their brand category”?

See, you’ve got me thinking Jack!  

Ooh, I like this, Michael. (I find my short posts are good for these thoughts, too—because they allow us to explore more.)
   My first reaction was ‘dynamic’, given that audience perceptions are dynamic. That static brands are “Branding 1·0”. However, every brand must have a core—regardless of how positively or negatively it is viewed, there is always an intersection between how the organization views its brand, and how the collective of consumers views it.
   Whether the vision and values are part of the core is another interesting consideration. The problem is the vision can be held in a different form by the audience; ditto the values. But I think realistically it is fair to say there are aspects of the vision that are held universally by organization and audience that will be static.
   Maybe it is like those stars which have a solid core and a gaseous surface. The core is technically moving as it rotates around the universe, but to a closer observer the changes seem to be happening only on the surface.
   I am no astronomer or scientist so forgive me if my analogy actually doesn’t work in those circles!
   On how values and visions change: I would say they need to be as subject to the audiences as every other part of the brand equation. Say Company A says its vision is x and the sum of the audience perceptions of the vision is x ± 0·01 (the same perception but with some variance). Then what we have under the “new model” is for x to shift toward x ± 0·01. That becomes the “new” x. or x1. But the audience may hold, because the environment is also changing, a new perception, which is x1 ± 0·01.
   So x is still somewhere in there, but not as much—it has shifted, though 0·99 of it has remained as a static core.
   I am not a mathematical person either (you could even say I am numerophobic!) but I hope this makes sense!