Marketing academics, brand thinkers and most of the industry started banging on about brand relationships, lovemarks and golden circles. Wildly exaggerated concepts that made for great discussion, but which missed the quotidian role that brands actually played in the life of most people. We overthought things and made the cardinal error of assuming brands were as big for consumers as they were for us marketers.

Mark Ritson, a brand consultant and columnist for the U.K.-based publication Marketing Week, writing recently about why he thinks marketers should take more risks in the story, “Damaging Brand Image Is Rarely Harmful Because it Matters so Little.”