Radical Value: Why Brands Must Rethink What They Measure, and What They’re Building

As automation, AI, and performance dashboards become standard operating tools, many brands are discovering an unexpected problem: despite more data than ever, fewer organizations are truly remembered.

On January 15, brand strategist Rande Vick releases Radical Value: Building Brands to be Uncannily Memorable, a book that challenges how modern organizations define success, and why optimization alone is no longer enough.

For decades, brand value has been assessed through metrics like impressions, engagement, loyalty scores, and conversion rates. While these indicators remain useful, Radical Value argues they are incomplete. The deeper drivers of preference (i.e., memory, trust, belief, and meaning) are often ignored because they are harder to quantify.

“Most companies don’t fail because they lack data,” says Vick. “They struggle because they’ve optimized the system without understanding the human mind it’s meant to serve.”

Drawing on neuroscience, behavioral research, and more than twenty years inside corporate and independent brands, Radical Value reframes branding as a discipline rooted in how experiences are encoded in the brain. The book introduces a practical framework for leaders to evaluate decisions not just by short-term performance, but by the long-term memories and associations they create.

The timing is deliberate. As AI increasingly flattens execution, differentiation is shifting upstream, away from tactics and toward identity, coherence, and trust. In this environment, brands that endure will be those that understand how people remember, not just how they click.

Radical Value builds on Vick’s earlier work in Neurobranding and expands it into a broader strategic lens for founders, executives, and brand stewards navigating irreversible decisions. The book includes a foreword by Dr Paul Zak, whose research on trust and immersion has shaped how organizations think about human motivation and engagement.

Rande Vick is the founder of Vick Agency and a frequent contributor to BrandingMag. He will also be speaking at NAMM Show 2026, where he will explore why memory – not attention – is becoming the defining currency of brand growth.