Published Online:December 2025
Product Name:The IUP Journal of Brand Management
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJBRM021225
DOI:10.71329/IUPJBRM/2025.22.4.21-34
Author Name:Babu George
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Management
Download Format:PDF
Pages:21-34
The paper proposes a radical reconceptualization of branding by rejecting its traditional identity-centric foundations. Instead of positioning brands as symbolic representations of organizational essence, the proposed axioms conceptualize brands as dynamic, behavior-shaping forces embedded within cultural, cognitive, and systemic environments. Drawing on contemporary scholarship that views brands as co-created processes, cultural systems, and networked actors, this framework advances eight theoretical propositions paired with illustrative contemporary examples. The resulting framework shifts branding from a discipline of differentiation, storytelling and controlled messaging to one grounded in behavioral triggers, category dissolution, memetic propagation, subconscious predictive structures, permission dynamics, default-line dependencies, protocol-based architectures and behavior-first identity formations. Collectively, these axioms argue for a foundational reset: that is, branding emerges not as the construction of meaning, but as the engineering of cognitive and cultural effects.
Mainstream branding theory has long anchored itself to the principles of identity formation, differentiation within established categories, and the construction of coherent narratives. While these assumptions have shaped decades of academic and professional practice, they rest upon conceptual foundations that increasingly fail to account for