BRAND AS A MOAT? I’ll be honest - I struggled whether to include Brand in this list of moats. I ultimately decided not to, because I think it’s too hard to measure, and in many cases the underlying brand strength is due to something something more fundamental — network effects, switching costs, or scale economies — that the brand merely reflects. A strong brand is often the symptom of a real moat, not the moat itself. The danger of counting Brand as a moat is that it flatters companies that are actually quite fragile. WeWork had a brand. Peloton had a brand. Both burned through goodwill the moment the underlying economics cracked. Brand without a structural underpinning is just reputation — and reputation is rented, not owned. So I think about brand the way I think about customer loyalty scores: useful as a signal, dangerous as an explanation. When someone tells me a company’s moat is its brand, my follow-up is always the same 2 questions. (a) what built the brand, and (b) can that be replicated? That answer usually points to the real moat, or in many cases, reveals there isn’t one.