After becoming an insta-celebrity for revealing a great rack in Robin Thicke’s unavoidable “Blurred Lines” video, model Emily Ratajkowski was asked what she’d like to do with her newfound fame. She didn’t hope to parlay it into a career as a pop star or leading lady. She declared, “I want to be a brand.” That’s a thing that not only companies, but people, aspire to now, hoping to sell themselves as much as a product. It’s not just the car you purchase, but also the driver in the commercial, in a sense. An excerpt from a new Economist piece about a recently deceased leader in the birthing of this unnatural phenomenon:

“Wally Olins started his career as an officer in one of these companies: as a history graduate of Oxford University he could, in those days, hardly be a private. He spent five years running Ogilvy & Mather’s office in Mumbai (and kept close ties with India for the rest of his life). But when he returned to England in the early 1960s he was disillusioned with his profession’s prevailing ideas. He decided to form a new company with a young designer called Michael Wolff. And he turned Wolff Olins into the command centre of a brand revolution.

He told his clients they needed to think more seriously about the collective identity of their organisation: if nurtured, this would provide them with a unique selling proposition in a crowded market, and an emotional connection to their customers. This changed both the focus of advertising and the relationship between the admen and their clients. Brand-building, Mr Olins saw, is not just an add-on which the company can buy when it wants to launch a new product. It is an integral part of its long-term strategy that guides the sort of products it rolls out.

Mr Olins spent the rest of his life broadening and deepening this insight.”