Today, any brand has a potential army of credible, unpaid spokespeople that are willing to work on its behalf. And this army is the exact same group of people who are willing to work against it.

This is the new world of what I call the “post-positioning era” of branding. In the post-positioning era of branding, what you say about your product or service matters almost nothing at all, and what I, the consumer, can do with it matters completely.

The new conditions of brand success:

1. Deliver a kick-ass product.

2. Be honest.

Our ability as advertisers to contrive and disseminate an emotional response through advertising is diminishing rapidly. And brand exposure is not the same as brand experience. A single one-star review on Yelp trumps 60 seconds of Super Bowl airtime.

But this is good news; you no longer need to “capture” your audience. People are willfully engaging with your brand, starting discussions about it of their own volition, and using it as a way to define who they are, by “liking” a brand on Facebook, or touting it on their blog. They just want to know why your company should be part of their own personal brand.

There’s a lot of talk about the dialogue between a consumer and a company, but it’s an important idea. Brands have a responsibility to create a better structure for those conversations. We need to stop buying and selling ideas about brands that don’t have any substance behind them and start enabling people to discover why they should incorporate a company’s brand into their own.