If you have trouble in your private life, who are you going to speak to? Not the new friend you made the day before, but people you trust and have known forever. Vuitton, Berluti, Hermes: it is those brands that have never compromised on quality or values that people turn to.

I do think that in a digital future, consumers will increasingly turn to brands that they trust. Trust, security, and service are even more important in a digital world.

Brands are all about trust. That trust is built in drops and lost in buckets.

If anything, the impact of digital technology is creating bigger brands and bigger superstars.

My smile has been my ticket to the world. Smiling releases the same feel-good hormones you get jogging. Caring for your lips and gums is important. I brush my teeth morning and night, alternating toothpaste brands. In addition to flossing, I use a Water Pik to massage my gums and remove food particles.

Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.

As I've progressed in my career, I've come to appreciate - and really value - the other attributes that define a company's success beyond the P&L: great leadership, long-term financial strength, ethical business practices, evolving business strategies, sound governance, powerful brands, values-based decision-making.

Who I was was not acceptable to black L.A. youth: the way I spoke and my sense of humor. Everybody else had relaxers and pressed hair. I wore my hair in an Afro puff. Nappy. The way I dressed. It was all about name brands at the time in L.A. I had no idea. All those things, I failed miserably at.

All fashion brands are about looking good. Being Human is also about doing good. And you can do good by the simple act of slipping into a t-shirt or a pair of jeans.

Being in Loyola College exposed me to other options and gave me confidence, apart from the freedom to bunk classes. I became a merchandiser and then a garment manufacturer, and interacting with foreign buyers and manufacturing foreign brands in India gave me a high.

I am not only an athlete and sports entertainer, but also have a huge passion for fitness, beauty and fashion, so I am open to many different types of brands. When it comes to brands approaching me, I just need them to be very specific, to the point of what they want and need from me.

Vivametrica isn't the only company vying for control of the fitness data space. There is considerable power in becoming the default standard-setter for health metrics. Any company that becomes the go-to data analysis group for brands like Fitbit and Jawbone stands to make a lot of money.

Linguistics is a good way of defining the culture of a brand. The vocabulary used by sports and lifestyle brands - running, fitness, training, motorsports - is all about functionality, whereas the vocabulary of the luxury business - handbags, ready-to-wear - is all about the product.

Brands who come to China, often they just care about price - so they actually drive the suppliers to cut corners on environmental standards to win a contract.

Chinese brands will face many obstacles when marketing to Western consumers. Beyond the associations with poor quality and unsound environmental practices, they generally do not have the marketing capabilities or budgets to build powerful global brands.

We'll continue to see more and more brands integrate social causes, charitable components and environmental issues as underlying themes to their campaigns and messaging. Humans connect with humans after all, and brands are using this as a point of connection to engage with their audience, especially charity-minded Generation Y.

We now see numerous examples of brands working together to address issues such as environmental degradations, climate control, pollution, poverty and disease.

I want young people to be able to buy into what I design. When I was young, I wanted to buy designer brands even if all I could afford was the cheapest wallet, the cheapest pen, the cheapest T-shirt because I wanted to be a part of it.

All brands, whether high-ticket luxury ones such as Cartier or Rolls-Royce or 'masstige' ones with luxe-y overtones but altogether more affordable, all want to grow. Even brands that may have started in a modestly niche design and lifestyle fashion can find themselves under pressure to go global or to sell out at the top.

I am extremely involved in the design process of both my brands, Winter Kate and House of Harlow 1960.

We have received a heritage of craftsmanship, of aesthetics, of taste, of identity. Our brands have the beauty to preserve and perpetuate it.

If you look at the brands that I like, there are brands I like because of the clothes; then, there are brands I like because of their attitude and mentality.

At LVMH, we have amazing heritage brands, and we put interesting talents in those brands, sometimes very young, like we did at Givenchy with Riccardo Tisci at the time, or like we just did with J.W. Anderson at Loewe, but also talents that are already further along in their careers, like Raf Simons at Christian Dior or Nicolas at Vuitton.