The brand as a legal construct: a Doctrinal Inquiry into an undefined concept at the crossroads of Intellectual Property Law and the Polish Doctrine of personal interests

The brand is among the most ubiquitous notions of contemporary commerce and, paradoxically, it does not appear as an autonomous legal category in any of the major intellectual property regimes. Management scholarship defines it in mutually incompatible ways —as logo, as legal instrument, as identity system, as personality, as relationship, as semiotic marketing system—, while Aaker’s paradigmatic brand equity model compresses the whole edifice of intellectual property into a single residual entry called “other proprietary brand assets”. This article carries out a doctrinal inquiry into the legal place of the brand as a concept. It starts from the definitional vacuum in intellectual property law, contrasts the conceptual architecture of management with the legal categories that are actually on offer, decomposes Aaker’s fifth heading into its real normative regimes and proposes a “protection gap” matrix that exposes the systemic asymmetry between value-creation and legal protection. Finally, the paper articulates a reading of the brand as a new personal interest under Polish civil law, in the light of recent jurisprudence.