Branding in today’s environment can be considered a macroscopic property that emerges from the bottom-up customer conversations taking place face-to-face, over mobile phones or on blogs. These conversations are complemented with the help of video and images using Flickr, YouTube and MySpace. Simple moves by consumers in Web environments complemented by small expenditures in advertising can result in new brands emerging overnight. This contrasts markedly with the linear approach to advertising that requires large amounts of money to blanket the media to meet target audience ratings. What separates the brands most likely to emerge overnight from others are the stories that consumers tell each other about brands rather than listening to contrived yet highly creative advertising stories.

The most likely opportunity uppermost in the minds of marketing and advertising executives alike is how recent brands, including Google, have so rapidly become entrenched in our global culture. In just a few years, brands like YouTube (early 2005 launch), Flickr (February 2004) and MySpace (around 2001) have emerged to become a part of our everyday vocabulary. The speed with which select brands emerge as if from out of nowhere applies equally to low technology environments. Nudie fruit juice established in Sydney during 2003, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation TV is gripping viewers worldwide since the turn of the century and of course Dan Brown the author recognized as much by his name as the Da Vinci Code phenomenon. So quiet how do we explain the success of these brands? How can we transplant what made these brands so successful to help new brands?

These types of brands exhibit the phenomena of emergence. This is a characteristic of complex systems. These are systems of multiple interacting parts or components that exhibit a behavior that is greater than the sum of the parts. So when we see bees swarming, birds flocking or fish swimming in a school, by focusing our attention on the individual fish or bee we would not have expected the "big picture" or macroscopic swarm or school behavior that emerges. Furthermore, the swarm or school can be subjected to tinkering as seen from predators e.g., sharks attacking a school allow us to witness that after an attack the fish regroup to the previous pattern (see the freely available simulation at www.kewlschool.com). This emergence is counterintuitive or non-linear and an unexpected surprise for onlookers as well as exhibiting resilience to outside forces. The conditions for emergence requires interactions between the component parts i.e., the fish swimming an average distance from each other, on average roughly in the same direction as the nearest neighbor and, of course, the all important ruleto flee from sharks. Simple rules result in complex behaviors that cannot be extrapolated from observing the individual fish. So, how does this impact branding?

Traditionally, advertising executives and marketers are used to following an overall plan that by nature is linear. That is, expend thousands of dollars for aircover by blanketing customers with the brand message, review the brand metrics and reinforce with further advertising until the plan is completed by meeting target audience ratings. Instead, emergent branding arises as a by-product of a variety of activities that encourage customer interaction to take place. These activities are non-linear; i.e., the relative expenditure can be small compared with traditional approaches, but the impact is very large. Extending our metaphors from nature the interactions we must focus our attention on are the conversations taking place between consumers around a brand.

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