Brands had become relationships. In the late 1990s, Gad's firm Brandflight saw branding change. It moved from "Transaction Branding", built around the product or service, to "Relation Branding", which came with the internet. In Relation Branding, the customer experience is in focus, and the relationship between brand and customer has become "the essence of a modern brand" (Brandflight, 2019, opening section). Richard Branson made the same point in his foreword to Gad's book 4-D Branding, published in 2000. In his words, "Brands are now pinned around a relationship instead of a product" (Branson, as cited in Macrae, 2001, p. 147). Gad built his tools for this "new type of brands for the new (digital) age" (Brandflight, 2019, opening section).

A brand with a future counts as the company's most valuable asset. In the last chapter of his book, Gad writes that a brand with a future "is always regarded as the company's most valuable asset". The brand "is not just a marketing tool, it is quite often the critical 'substance' of the company". Yet officially it is not treated as an asset. Property, machinery and technology matter much less, but they are the assets that get audited every year (Gad, as cited in Macrae, 2001, p. 148). His firm calls branding "one of the key management systems in a modern business" and defines it as "managing the perception" in people's minds (Brandflight, 2019, opening section).

Brands need more than one dimension to last. Djordjevic, who summarises the Croatian edition of Gad's book, states the core argument plainly. "A brand cannot be based on a single dimension" (Djordjevic, 2008, p. 81). Brandflight's current website tells how the idea began. Gad had grown impatient with descriptions of brands as logos, campaigns or a tone of voice. None of them explained why some brands lasted and others did not. His answer was that a brand is a relationship, and that it lives in four dimensions at once (Brandflight, 2026, "It Started With a Book"). Today the firm is led by Annette Rosencreutz, Gad's partner for more than fifteen years (Brandflight, 2026, "A Practice Built by Two People"; "The School and Practice Today"). It sees the four dimensions as a kind of insurance. A brand that is strong in all four will be forgiven a break of trust in one of them. A brand that is strong only in the functional dimension, in what its product does, goes out of business when the product fails (Brandflight, 2026, "Four Dimensions, One Brand").

The model rests on one idea. A brand exists mainly in people's minds, and there it lives in four dimensions at once (Djordjevic, 2008, pp. 79–80; Brandflight, 2019, "Brand Strategy"). They are the functional, the social, the mental and the spiritual dimension (Djordjevic, 2008, p. 80; Brandflight, 2019, "Brand Strategy"). Put simply, they cover what the product offers, the group people want to belong to, how people see themselves and what the brand gives to society as a whole (Djordjevic, 2008, pp. 80–81). Gad calls the space the brand takes up in people's minds the Brand Mind Space (Macrae, 2001, p. 148). Brandflight describes it as a "stretching out" of the brand's four dimensions (Brandflight, 2019, "Brand Strategy"). Macrae, reviewing the book, pictures this space as extending "like a spider's web in all four dimensions" (Macrae, 2001, p. 148). Four principles follow from this idea.

• Outcome first: the strategy process starts with "the expected outcome of the Brand in the minds of the stakeholders". The Brand Mind Space is the tool for setting it (Brandflight, 2019, "Brand Strategy"). Stakeholders are customers and the other groups a brand deals with, such as employees, suppliers or investors (Brandflight, 2019, "Ethnography Interviews").
• No dimension alone: a brand cannot rest on a single dimension. The brand manager's hardest task is to plan how the four overlap and work together. None of them may be strengthened at the expense of the others (Djordjevic, 2008, p. 81).
• A code at the centre: the second model, the Brand Code, is built from inputs such as product, positioning, style and values (Brandflight, 2019, "Brand Strategy"). It is placed "in the center of the 4-dimensional Brand Mind Space", like a spider in its web. Activities and touchpoints are then planned from this centre, dimension by dimension (Brandflight, 2019, "Internal Brand Activation"; "Customer Brand Experience Touch-Points"). Touchpoints are the points where customers come into contact with the brand, from advertising to sales staff and the website (Brandflight, 2019, "Customer Brand Experience Touch-Points").
• One brand, many minds: every consumer, or every group of consumers, has their own brand space and may read the brand's messages in different ways. This is why the brand must be clearly defined, easy to recognise and different from competing brands (Djordjevic, 2008, pp. 81–82).

Brandflight's method runs in five steps and uses Gad's tools along the way. The top management team works out each brand strategy in a workshop of one to one and a half days. If the brand already exists, Brandflight speaks of "decoding" it. The firm sees two gains in this. The key people in the organisation share ownership of the brand, and the executive team grows more committed and stronger (Brandflight, 2019, opening section).

• Ethnographic interviews: long, deep interviews of up to two hours with 10 to 15 representative customers or other stakeholders. They are structured so that the strategy does not rest on clichés and popular phrases. Instead, the interviewer looks for "the weak signals", the small hints that are easy to miss, and for personal ways of putting things (Brandflight, 2019, "Ethnography Interviews").
• Brand strategy: the team first sets the expected outcome in the stakeholders' minds with the Brand Mind Space. Then it draws up the Brand Code (Brandflight, 2019, "Brand Strategy").
• Internal activation: this step turns the strategy into action inside the company. The Brand Code is set in the centre of the Brand Mind Space, and the team plans tangible activities in each of the four dimensions. Brandflight calls this tool the Brand Activity Generator. Clients also create five symbolic projects that show how the brand turns from an idea into a visible result. A further tool is a short brand story that everyone can tell when asked what they do (Brandflight, 2019, "Internal Brand Activation").
• Touchpoint coding: for each touchpoint, the team sets the Brand Code in the Brand Mind Space again and decides the touchpoint's most important criteria in each dimension. Touchpoints fall into three groups. Static ones include advertising and the products themselves, human ones include sales and service, and digital ones include the web and social media (Brandflight, 2019, "Customer Brand Experience Touch-Points").
• External activation: ideas, programmes and systems keep the brand active over time, so that the strategy comes alive in real relations with customers and other stakeholders (Brandflight, 2019, "External Brand Activation").

Gad's book itself contains "simple, insightful exercises" for everyone who takes part in the work on the brand (Macrae, 2001, p. 147). Brandflight has used the method for launches, rebrandings, mergers and acquisitions, new markets and start-ups. It has also used it for cities, regions and countries, for public institutions and for personal branding (Brandflight, 2019, opening section).

Djordjevic uses the model to discuss Serbia as a country brand. He shows a Brand Mind Space for Serbian brands, taken from Placebrands, and the Brand Mind Space and Brand Code of the Serbian spring water Voda Voda (Djordjevic, 2008, pp. 81–82). For a country brand, he argues, the four dimensions "must overlap and support one another, and not conflict" (Djordjevic, 2008, p. 85).

Kovaleva, Epstein and Parik used Gad's model, which they call the "brand field", to structure the brand of the Russian Museum of Ethnography in St Petersburg. In a figure taken from Soboleva and Epstein (2015), education stands in the functional dimension and tolerance in the social one. The two other fields are labelled person dimension, with ethnic identity, and psychological dimension, with national identity (Kovaleva et al., 2018, p. 131). The authors then surveyed students who had visited the museum about how they see it (Kovaleva et al., 2018, p. 133).