Whose Brand is it anyway?

I can't tell you the number of times I have asked in a lecture room full of brand people 20 floors above Canary Wharf, "Who owns the brand?" The brand people to a man, woman and hermaphrodite answer, "We do."
"If that's the case," I prompt, "I want each of you to write a one liner on the brand." After a few minutes of allowing them to look deep into the recesses of their considerably well-educated minds (for the corporately approved answer), or out of the window over the Thames (for a little personal inspiration), I collect the answers and list out the incredible, not even remotely related range of answers. I then go for the brand jugular...
"If you lot can't reach a consensus, how are the hell are customers? The fact is, most brand gurus seem to have little or no interest in what real people think about brands. It's better to stick your head in the sand/up your own backside (take your pick) and just get on with thinking out of the box/our box (depending on amount of cocaine used to stimulate creative juices). After all, we are the pros, are we not? Why let the great unwashed/uneducated (those without an Eden Project-sized atrium in the office) have a say in anything? I wonder if this blinkered thinking is why direct is now bigger than brand and both will soon be subsumed into digital (the brand that people are defining and re-defining 24 hours a day. Start listening to what the people (not in artificially inseminated focus groups) are saying about your brand in real time and you might learn something: the truth about your brand.