Ultimately it's possible that social media platforms will be designed as templates that the users themselves customize in terms of the best way to express their community and experience of life and brands will have to simply follow suit.

We now see numerous examples of brands working together to address issues such as environmental degradations climate control pollution poverty and disease.

Brands must have a point of view on that purposeful engagement whether it's directed towards the environment poverty water as a resource or causes such as breast cancer or education. Merely declaring your commitment to a category or cause will not be enough the distinguish your brand sufficiently to see a return on these well-intended efforts.

If there is a gay uniform the differences are in how each man coordinates the details: the brand and cut of the jeans the design of belts and boots the haircut the number and size of earrings.

I am extremely excited to develop and design a brand representative of my life experiences and style. Working closely with Cherokee will help establish a worldwide presence with best-in-class retailers and category leaders.

I am extremely involved in the design process of both my brands Winter Kate and House of Harlow 1960.

I don't deal with death very well. My brother John Candy my dad my mom Brandon Tartikoff just a couple of weeks ago. I mean you lose a lot of people in your life and that's one thing I am constantly working on - pain management.

I want to speak up and tell you that mascara and clothes don't make you cool neither do name-brand handbags but being a leader can.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to build some kind of lifestyle brand that was preppy and cool.

I think fashion is a lot of fun. I love clothes. More than fashion or brand labels I love design. I love the thought that people put into clothes. I love when clothes make cultural statements and I think personal style is really cool. I also freely recognize that fashion should be a hobby.

Obama has made America cool again - and more than that he's made his own brand arguably the most powerful the world has ever known.

Brands must empower their community to be change agents in their own right. To that end they need to take on a mentoring role. This means the brand provides the tools techniques and strategies for their customers to become more effective marketers in achieving their own goals.

The creative destruction that social media is currently unleashing will change more than technology or the leader board of the Fortune 100. It is driving a qualitative shift in the nature of relationships between brands and their customers.

The question remains: which brands will commit to creating a private sector pillar of social change and which will become casualties of their own outdated thinking?

The new dynamics between brands and consumers driven by social media are proving to be a powerful impetus for change.

I definitely love that all these car brands are coming out with hybrid forms of every car that they have. It's very awesome because I think it does make a difference and it doesn't hurt that you save a lot of money on gas.

Spending $1 for a brand new house would feel very very good. Spending $1 000 for a ham sandwich would feel very very bad. Spending $19 000 for a small family car would feel well more or less right. But as with physical pain fiscal pain can depend on the individual and everyone has a different threshold.

I recorded a song called I Fall to Pieces and I was in a car wreck. Now I'm worried because I have a brand-new record and it's called Crazy!

When I started Netscape I was brand new out of college and all the aspects of building a business like balance sheets and hiring people were new to me.

In the social business marketplace brands that hope to build loyal and growing communities do so most effectively when they demonstrate their core values and allow a community to build and engage around it.

The social business marketplace is effectively forcing brands to engage with consumers on the basis of something that is meaningful to them. More often than not this takes the form of some core value that finds expression in a non-profit cause.

Perhaps the most effective way to describe the approach a brand must take is to think of themselves as social cartographers. By that I mean that brands must simultaneously inspire engage and maintain a series of conversations taking place within certain cultural landscape specific to their business goal.

What today's business reality makes clear is that brands cannot survive in a society that is failing economically socially ethically and morally.

Your premium brand had better be delivering something special or it's not going to get the business.