Market leaders are acutely aware of the value of the brand as a corporate asset with many household brands contributing millions to the bottom line of a company’s balance sheet.

As a practitioner in PR, and custodian of the corporate brand, I fully appreciate its inherent power as a potent promotional tool and communicator of an intangible promise to deliver.

But the brand is a complex beast consisting of many different facets that make up the whole. Externally, the corporate identity portrays the public face of the brand yet at its heart are the values the brand represents.

Just like a FTSE100 listed company, personally we all have a public face that we portray to the world, which personifies our own individual brand. But all this external portrayal of ourselves requires maintenance and, as I celebrate another birthday, I am reminded that my own ‘corporate identity’ is metamorphosising into Yoda.

Now, we all know that no-one is immune to the ravages of time and short of a complete re-design of my own corporate identity with a scalpel, there is little that can be done to make it resemble Jessica Rabbit.

But as I stop to reflect, I am secretly pleased to be the right side of 40 and find comfort in the fact that inner beauty does not decay and am grateful that the potency of the brand really is down to its internal values.

Perhaps it’s fine to be more like Yoda than Jessica Rabbit after all.