A fab article by Prof Jenni Romaniuk here - I'm particularly enjoying "one of the biggest own-goals of the advertising industry is the invention of the ‘Brand-building' campaign". I tend to agree it's not the most helpful framing we could be using!

https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/opinion/lets-ask-a-better-question-why-doesnt-advertising-work-more-often/4006

I wonder if this is partly due to a shift in the way that the word "brand", always a slippery creature, is used. If you look at what "brand manager" originally described, it was basically a biz dev role for that product / vertical. Brand building was a way of saying "grow sales".

Now "the brand" has become a reified entity or objective in and of itself - a mouth to feed, a deity to worship, a thing, however abstract, in its own right.