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group of people that made them. They cannot be easily copied. They cannot be recycled. A brand is like an artist's signature (in Virgin's case our brand is literally an artist's signature!) What you make of your brand is up to you. While I hope and expect that there are lessons in this chapter for you, I cannot tell you what your brand should do. What I will do is ask that you take it seriously – as seriously as a painter treats the signatures on his canvases.

A brand should reflect what you can do. You have to deliver, faultlessly and for all time, whatever your brand promises, so it's better to make your offering sound witty and innovative than to pretend you're more than you are. Get the brand right from the start, by being honest with yourself about what it is you're offering . A brand will eventually date you, so I think you're better off intelligently evolving it as we have always done than tritely updating it. These rather trivial rebrandings generate a lot of fairly funny adverse publicity, and with good reason: they're a sort of corporate comb-over – and about as effective.

This, anyway, was our philosophy when we came up with the name 'Virgin' – and I had to respond vigorously to the Registrar of Companies Office in the UK when they said the name Virgin was too rude to register. Part of that response consisted of proving that 'Virgin' had been used as a ship's name without complaint as far back as 1699 and indeed one such ship was recorded as having docked at Cadiz on 26 April 1699 in the May edition of the London Gazette . It was a bit risqué, I suppose – a bit of fun. But the word wasn't simply plucked out of the air. It reflected the fact that every business we began, we started from scratch. We've been 'virgins' in almost every new business field we've entered. To my mind the name Virgin was the opposite of rude: it meant pure, in its original condition, unexploited and never used. Virgin referred to us, because we were all virgins in business. Registering the brand was critical. Defending it in every legal jurisdiction in the world has been expensive. But it's all proved essential for Virgin's success.

A brand's meanings are acquired over time. Some meanings will be the product of serious discussions and years of directed and dedicated effort. Some meanings will just stick to the brand, whether you like it or not. Remember, a brand always means something , and ultimately, you can control the meaning of your brand only through what you deliver to the customer.

If I describe to you Virgin's early years, you'll be able to see how the Virgin brand came to mean what it does today. I would like to say that all the things Virgin means to people were the product of masterful business planning. They weren't. Luckily, we did a good job, so the labels that stuck to us were generally positive, whether we intended them or not.

Immediately, however, I am confronted by the fairly frightening fact that I will have to explain to younger readers what music meant to my generation. How else are they going to understand Virgin Records, our first company?

I believe music isn't as central to most young people's lives today as it was back in the 1970s. There's a lot of brilliant music around today – I think about KT Tunstall and Amy Winehouse for starters – but looking back, the 1970s was a unique time, and people then had an incredible passion for rock music.

Partly, it was about choice. In those days, living in England, we didn't have DVDs and mobile phones, and we didn't have an array of TV channels – only BBC and ITV – and computer games were the playthings of superpowers, who used them to target their deadly arsenals of nuclear weapons. So for young people most of their time and energy was spent on music – and that meant buying records. It was the one luxury kids had. Anticipating a new Led Zeppelin, Yes or Queen album kept us going for weeks.

In the 1970s and 80s, album releases were monumental events;