Brands are often compared to people. It is a convenient mental model for understanding how they behave, and one of the oldest tools in the consultant’s kit bag for articulating key attributes. You’ve heard it a million times: ‘If this brand were a person….’

In a world which professes a heightened focus on the customer, it makes great sense to personify brands and their attributes. It helps remind us that we are building relationships, not just notching up transactions. And it helps us understand problems when they arise if we can think of them in human terms.

It also helps us understand brand relationships. For instance, is iBook great because it’s an Apple product, or is Apple great because of the iBook? Certainly in this case the parent is made more attractive by the beauty of its child, but the child would never have been so beautiful if it had not come from this particular parent. In the context of a purchase decision they are what marketing guru David Aaker would call ‘co-drivers.’ Therefore, they’re more like sister and brother than parent and child.

A useful exercise in the world of consumer goods, but is it apt in the world of business to business? If brands are reflections of business relationships, the nature of B2B relationships may require an overhaul of the terminology of personification.

The concept of brand personality was a natural response to the need for distinguishing brands from each other in a competitive and commoditized marketplace. But when economic relationships become more fluid and dynamic, when competitive positioning is overlapped by partnerships, alliances and ‘co-opetition’ (a combination of co-operation and competition), personalities are not so clearly defined. In fact the concept of ‘person’ may not be granular enough to capture the way in which value chains intermingle. We may have to get biological.

On a New Zealand-based Web site catering to sales and marketing professionals, a visitor tries to explain the way in which relationships are changing in the business-to-business marketplace. It means ‘larger order sizes, dealing with multiple companies and employees, long-term contracts, ‘value’ partnerships or equity-driven relationships (not just price-driven) and complex or multi-payment methods, including supplier credit lines.’

This is not so much a world of discrete transactions, but simultaneous, multiple exchanges. He goes on: ‘There are opportunities to build your brand [by] sharing central business processes, restructuring business processes between you and your partners, adding ‘service’ that goes beyond a commodity focus, automating relationships and offering more of your business to your partners.’

How you build a brand doing that may be one of the first great challenges of the 21st century. This vision of e-marketplaces such as Covisint, the online supplier exchange begun as a partnership among Ford, GM, DaimlerChrysler, Nissan and Renault in 2000, was about sharing central business processes to create efficiency, not about branding.

In the same industry, we are seeing the emergence of far more integrated value chains. Take for example the production model now being proposed by DaimlerChrysler for its potential new plant in Windsor, Ont. In this facility, just-in-time delivery is given new meaning with the parts supplier taking space in the plant itself and owning a whole piece of the workflow. In this scenario, the brand relationships are under the hood, so to speak, mixing at the biomechanical level. They may be invisible to consumers, but they do matter to those who have to manage brands as financial assets.

They also matter to investors, who need to know, for instance, how much Magna there is in every car coming off the line around the world. We know that through its portfolio of subsidiaries, there are Magna products under the hoods (not to mention in the cabin, on the instrument panel, over the bumpers and throughout the drivetrain) of Ford, GM, DC, Volkswagen and BMW vehicles, along with a growing list of smaller original equipment manufacturers. It is becoming one of the world’s premier ingredient brands.

A few months ago this column took a cynical tone in response to a book called The Infinite Asset by former Booz Allen Hamilton consultants Sam Hill and Chris Lederer. The model of brand portfolio relationships constructed by Hill and Lederer is dubbed the ‘Brand Portfolio Molecule.’ I called it a ‘three-dimensional Tinkertoy on steroids.’

Despite the fact that it ends up looking that way, I may have been too glib, because contemporary brand portfolios don’t just include the brands you own, but also brands outside the corporation that are either purposely or accidentally associated with it. The molecular metaphor is, I think, a powerful and accurate way of modelling such relationships.

Welcome to bio-branding.

Will Novosedlik is a Toronto-based brand strategist. He can be reached at novosedlik@hotmail.com.