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our adverts and our publicity stunts. We have found over the years that giving people a good time, and making them feel like they're in on the joke, has been better for the brand than any amount of complex campaigning.

I'll give you a quick example: on Virgin Atlantic flights we had these beautifully designed salt and pepper pots. At least, we had them when we took off. By the time we landed, most of them had disappeared. Our passengers were swiping them and using them at their own dinner tables. What to do? We decided to make a joke of it. At the bottom of each pot we stamped the words 'Pinched from Virgin Atlantic'. We turned an embarrassment into a piece of cheeky loss-leader promotion. We got people onside by bringing them in on the joke. In itself, this was a fairly trivial matter; repeated across our whole group, our fun-loving attitude makes a tremendous difference to our business.

Irreverent humour is one of Virgin's brand values, and this has to do with our wanting to be honest about the ups and downs of our business and to share what we think with the people who matter most to us – our customers. The people who read our adverts are the same people who read about our tussles, our setbacks and our mistakes. So why would we want to pretend the real world doesn't affect us? Everybody knows of our run-ins with BA over the years. When the world's press gathered to watch BA erect their London Eye Ferris wheel on London's South Bank and we heard they were having technical problems, we scrambled our airship. The banner trailing behind it read: ' BA can't get it up .' We also had a lot of fun when we introduced onboard massages on Virgin Atlantic, running an advertisment in the newspapers saying ' BA doesn't give a shiatsu! '

When Sydney Airport Corporation (owned by a division of the very successful Macquarie Bank) decided arbitrarily to raise their landing charges, Virgin Blue's CEO Brett Godfrey and I decided to put a slogan on the side of our planes and on the massive billboards lining the road to the airport. ' Macquarie. What a load of bankers! ' It made headlines, and it made a point: the bankers seemed to be after easy cash at the expense of the low-cost market. Eventually Macquarie agreed to renegotiate the fee question. I dressed up as a native American Indian, smoking a pipe of peace, and buried the hatchet with them. (Literally – it's still there somewhere, under the tarmac!) It was one of those 'No hard feelings, mate' moments, and I think the Australian public enjoyed our irreverent approach. Interestingly, as a result, we've now become partners in a number of companies. Befriending one's enemy is a good rule for business – and life .

Too many companies want their brands to reflect some idealised, perfected image of themselves. As a consequence, their brands acquire no texture, no character and no public trust. At Virgin, we certainly talk ourselves up, but we are genuinely a real company doing real work in the real world – not some sort of alien visitation.

It may be that Virgin has grown up to be one model of what a modern company should be. It may be that, by making the customer the focus of its business, and by giving good customer service a brand name, Virgin has created something genuinely new in the business world – something future generations can emulate and build upon.

Past a certain age, we all want to be Moses, leading our people into the promised land. Then I look at myself in the mirror in the morning after a heavy night and I think: Oh, Richard, get over it!

Virgin may simply be odd – an accident of history. I like fun. I began work in a decade that prized fun. People associate me with that decade and the feel-good factor has stuck with me ever since. Virgin's been a rallying point for that spirit of fun – but would Virgin have worked at any other period of history? Would it work now? The bottom line is, we'll never know.

Good brands reflect the histories of the time and the