Essential ingredients for a collaborative performance: the brand, the employees, and the digital in between Catarina Lelis, University of West London Oscar Mealha, University of Aveiro Keywords: Branding, participatory design, employees, participatory brand centre, digitally- mediated communication Purpose The brand no longer fits Shannon and Weaver’s traditional model of information transmission, mostly because branding unidirectional approaches have been supplanted. This reorientation required from companies a new kind of dominant philosophy, which must necessarily be established and assimilated by all employees, as individuals. Besides the fact that these must be minimally familiar with the brand identity they represent and with which they commit themselves, they must also realise that their participation in the brand’s organic structure represents the constant conversion and maintenance of the brand itself. Designer Marty Neumeier states: Unlike the old corporate identity paradigm that prized uniformity and consistency, the new brand paradigm sacrifices those qualities in favour of being alive and dynamic. (…) Brands can afford to be inconsistent — as long as they don’t abandon their defining attributes. They’re like people. (…) A living brand is a collaborative performance, and every person in the company is an actor (2006: 133-136). The establishment of an institutional philosophy of this nature requires an investment in training collaborative individuals. Employees (being these all the individuals that, as some point, provide institutions with their work and capabilities, either full-time, part-time, no term, casual or voluntary) should, therefore, exploit their own brand knowledge and be confronted with any