Old & busted: BRANDS, New hotness: MEMES?

Adliterate's Meme Doctors post raises an interesting point. It cites the weakness of brand as a concept as reason to claim that memes are better than brands. But the weakness of the "brand" concept is no fault of the language, but of complacent and unimaginative agencies (and their interpretations). A brand is made entirely of memes; in other words, a brand is a memeplex.

The difference is only semantic. If you're not conscious of memes (whether you call them by name or not) when building a brand, you're simply not a good brand-builder. This doesn't make memes "better than" brands per se. Adliterate's stance is too much like saying molecules are better than cells, cells are better than organs, or organs are better than systems - it doesn't quite make sense, because you're really only talking about semantic differences in what makes a basic unit. Call it "brand building", "meme doctoring" or "cultural engineering"; I think it's all the same thing.