Book excerpt: Branding has become ubiquitous, with new brands becoming word-of-mouth successes literally overnight, and many welcome the easy familiarity they bring to daily life. But now brand proliferation is threatening not only to stifle true choice in the marketplace, but to render hard-won brand identities - some decades in the making - meaningless. With today's unprecedented access to thousands of brands a day, via Twitter, Facebook, and the rest, the balance of brand power is shifting irrevocably away from the businesses behind them. In Brandstorm, branding guru Liz Nickles argues that, as a result, the brand is no longer a value proposition in itself, and that marketers and brand managers must stop the dilution and focus on meaningful, market-specific reinvention for those brands that can stand the test of time. She offers the success secrets behind leading brands like Ralph Lauren, Justin Bieber, and Revlon, and how to channel them today.