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In last week’s blog Got Brand Strategy, Tom West commented that companies can no longer force a brand on the marketplace—that they have to believe in their brands first. In another post, Graham Hill mentioned that in the old way of marketing, communications created brands.

Experiences do create brands, but marketers still must figure out how to leverage those rich social experiences on the Interent and build effective communications strategies around their findings.

In an interview this month in The McKinsey Quarterly, Keith Pardy, senior vice president of strategic marketing for Nokia, says that it’s not about pushing messaging out. Companies must instead build interesting relationships with customers. He says that the Internet plays a more important role in branding than ever before and that marketers have to get used to people shaping their brand via Internet marketing.

But as an industry, marketers, he said, haven’t yet figured out how to leverage the creative potential that lies in people talking on the Internet about companies. “Consumers on the Internet are open to interesting ideas and they want to co-create content with you, but make no mistake: They are in charge.