Liquid Brands and the Power of Intangibles

One of a brand's main strengths is its ability to connect the business with its audiences and build relationships between the organization and people, both internal and external. To achieve this, it must be able to adapt and accompany the evolution of its audiences, communities, society, and what's happening in the world.

This is where today's topic comes in: liquid brands. These are brands that build from flexibility, authenticity, and vulnerability; brands that don't change for the sake of changing, but rather adapt their form while remaining constant even as tactics transform.

When we talk about building a brand and sustained positioning over time, we're not talking about logos, marketing, or a design system. We're talking about something that endures in the long term.

If you think about it as a person, you have an identity that has evolved over the years, but there's an essence, a thread that connects and gives meaning to everything in your life and who you are today, right?

Well, when we talk about building a brand, something very similar happens, allowing for some differences, of course. We seek to endow it with an identity, values, purpose, personality, and forms of expression that will enable the brand to connect and create the bonds we mentioned at the beginning, moving beyond being just a list of corporate characteristics and principles.

The concept of liquid brands is the idea that today, more than ever, we need to think of the brand as something flexible that can adapt to its environment without losing its essence — the substance that has given it identity and coherence from the start.

Liquid brands represent the strategic evolution necessary to navigate today's fragmented markets, where audiences, more than ever, seek authenticity and genuine brands. The idea doesn't imply constantly changing to follow temporary trends and sometimes meaningless performance metrics, but rather being able to transform in form while maintaining the organization's substance.

On the one hand, continuing to build for the long term; on the other, managing to adapt to connect with the moment — the needs, tensions, and experiences — the audience is experiencing and where value can be added.

Like tropical palms facing winds and hurricanes, the brand must have roots strong enough to remain firm while its crown stays flexible, adapting without being uprooted. Here, the roots represent the brand strategy — values, purpose, personality — while the crown symbolizes tactical execution that adapts to context.

Organizations that achieve this duality build sustainable loyalty because they accompany their communities' evolution without losing recognizable identity.

This capacity to be liquid doesn't happen by accident or through technological investment. So, how do we adapt and adjust to an environment without losing the brand's essence? The answer leads us to two intangible concepts that I consider essential for any brand today: authenticity and vulnerability.

In fragmented societies where three-quarters of consumers expect companies to improve their quality of life, brands that build on authentic intangibles capture value that their competitors, obsessed with technological parity, cannot replicate.

Intangibles as Strategic Advantages

Before diving into these concepts, why do we talk about intangibles as something so important? Between 1975 and 2020, intangible assets in S&P 500 companies went from representing 17% of market value to 90%.

Marty Neumeier affirms this by saying that when a product transcends its functionality to become a symbol of identity, status, or belonging, the symbol itself becomes the product. This transformation creates value far exceeding the tangible product's production cost.

Intangibles like authenticity, belonging, control, symbolism, and hope, among others, share a critical characteristic: they're difficult to replicate precisely because they can't be bought or implemented through capital investment. They require organizational consistency over time and coherence between saying it, being it, and doing it.

This is where the brand helps enormously, because long-term perceptions and emotions are built primarily on how it makes people feel, not on something "tangible."

The questions every organization must confront are direct:

• Are we valued for what we have or for who we are?
• How do we build value for those around us?

Companies valued for what they possess face a major weakness that's often "chosen" to be overlooked—any competitor with sufficient capital can replicate those assets. Organizations valued for how they are, in contrast, build a sustainable competitive advantage that can only be acquired over time and through consistent work.

Authenticity and Vulnerability: Two Key Intangibles

Among all the intangibles that build brand value, two have become particularly critical in the current context. In recent years, consumers have exposed purpose-washing, pink-washing, and greenwashing, compounded by the arrival of artificial intelligence with a wave of content that, in its eagerness to automate and reduce costs, loses identity. The result: widespread reputational crises due to unfulfilled promises or lack of coherence between what brands say they are and what they really are.

It's in this context of generalized skepticism where authenticity and vulnerability become tools to generate connection with audiences. Brands that share internal processes or simply admit their mistakes.

Through authenticity, brands today seek to integrate into people's lives not pursuing perfection and idealization, but rather closeness and familiarity. Although vulnerability has traditionally been seen as weakness, today it's the key to showing personality and values without holding back, and without fear of rejection. It's a window to show how the organization really is.

These are new ways of connecting with audiences, and primarily newer brands have understood this better, while those with more history still struggle a bit, but they can always become more liquid, more flexible.

These adjustments don't depend on industry or audience age, they have to do with the world we live in and a society seeking to balance how it relates to it.

The Paradox of Tangibles

Now, all this emphasis on the intangible doesn't mean that the tangible has lost relevance; in fact, it's experiencing a paradoxical resurgence.

While the tangible commoditizes in competitive terms, it resurges as aspirational value in the form of a digital antidote: quiet luxury or analog experiences represent a reaction to digital burnout. But even this return to the physical works because it activates intangibles: authenticity, control of time, real human connection. Today, tangibles serve as vehicles to bring intangibles to life and connect with the brand.

In Conclusion

Flexibility without identity is opportunism that erodes trust. Identity without flexibility is rigidity that leads to obsolescence.

Brands that thrive in this environment reconcile both dimensions, building competitive advantage on the only thing that can't be commoditized: the authentic and sustained perception of value in their audiences' minds.
 

Emanuel Westdorp is Founder of Naoz* Branding & Strategy Company, and Principal Brand Strategist. Transforming brands that drive business growth.