Many companies aspire to build brands that eventually get etched in the culture of the society and become cultural icons, but very few are able to achieve iconic status. Iconicity does not happen by chance, but rather has to be carefully planned and executed. If the ultimate benefit of branding enhances stakeholder value, boardroom leadership has to take charge of the brand ideals from the top of the pyramid and enable it to drive a shared vision throughout the organisation. This requires a balancing act between long-term perspective and short-term performance – often a difficult task, especially for publicly traded companies.
Identity myths and storytelling are keys to building iconic brands, but stories cannot substitute for great products and services. The strongest brands are first rooted in product and service performance. In all categories, a minimum standard of quality is necessary to even compete. Second, these quality products and services are differentiated in a way that can help defend their market positions – often with innovation as an integrated component of their company culture.
Third, they have all been running profitable and very well-driven operations that allow them to stick to a long-term plan and not deviate when times get tough. Assuming, then, that you have these pre-requisite strengths of product quality, differentiation and operations to become a competitive brand in the long-term, there is one final element remaining in order to elevate the brand to become truly iconic. This final dimension is a strong emotional connection.
A look at some of the most iconic brands in history such as Coca-Cola, Harley-Davidson, Giorgio Armani, Apple, Chanel, Hermès, IBM, L’Oréal, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Sony, Aman and Singapore Airlines reveals some very common characteristics. All these brands have been able to build and sustain strong emotional bonds with their customers and stakeholders that are far greater than their strengths in quality management, innovation and operations could achieve on their own. These brands have created an enduring mythology about themselves. They have mastered the art of storytelling and passed the responsibility of sharing that story to their brand communities who do it for them. For any brand to attain iconic status, it has to create an identity myth.
The term comes from Douglas Holt, whose study How Brands Become Icons (2004) traced how a handful of brands became cultural icons by telling stories that resolved the anxieties of their time. The idea has held up well. What follows is how an identity myth is created, told, owned, spread and renewed, and what each step asks of the leaders and owners behind the brand.
Brands that resonate and show direction to the masses through brand stories and brand activities become inscribed in our culture. These brands, by creating an identity for themselves, provide identity to members of society.
Brands in today’s world are not inanimate “things” but thriving entities with identities and personalities that allow customers to express themselves through consumption. As such, to attract customers and make them actively participate in varied branding activities, brands should have a strong story that customers can easily identify and relate to. Such a story would not only provide authenticity to the brand but allow customers to express their own unique sense of self through their purchase or association.
Psychological research demonstrates that brands are durable because people are cognitive misers. Our modern society is overloaded with information, and the average person receives far more information than one can possibly digest properly. Therefore, people seek to simplify the world by relying on a variety of heuristics to minimise the amount of information processing needed to make reasonable decisions. There is far more noise than signal in today’s multimedia world competing for customers’ attention. Audiences need something more enduring and unique than product features to grasp on to.
Humans are wired for narratives. We intuitively search for patterns where none exist and make up stories in order to make sense of the world around us. We are naturally sceptical of sales pitches and being instructed or told to do things, but we let down our guard for stories because they are less intrusive and can capture our imagination. Although they can be effective in the short term, the marketer’s tools of promotion and price discounting do little to create true loyalty. Furthermore, they can be easily copied by competitors, creating a downward spiral of discounting and bundling that distracts from whether a brand has a truly authentic narrative.
Humans are creatures of evolution and storytelling is at the centre of how we share ideas that matter and build relationships for survival.
Great brand stories that resonate with consumers and touch their lives in some way can be defined by a single word such as freedom (Harley-Davidson), power (BMW), design (Apple), elegance (Dior), imagination (LEGO), beauty (Estée Lauder) or safety (Volvo). These brand stories offer consumers a good reason to elevate the brand beyond a mere utilitarian role in the market. While logic opens the mind, emotions open the wallet.
When multiple elements of a brand such as images, stories and associations leverage deeper meanings or shared values, sociological research demonstrates that people are less likely to switch brands. Because these elements are shared collectively by groups and networks of people, they form generally accepted conventions about the brand. It is difficult for individuals to abandon shared conventions and, therefore, more difficult to switch brands. Marketing should no longer be about persuasion, but connection with the past, present or future.
A compelling brand story begins with the brand’s purpose. To build an iconic brand, a company’s purpose must be a clear transcendent idea – something that aspires to be more than simply a competitor in a particular market, gain market share or become “the chosen provider of” an item. Vision and mission are the cornerstones of brand and boardroom strategy. The vision gives the brand a reason for being while the mission provides it with strategic objectives.
A company’s first priority should be a clear point of view on what an organisation’s sustainable competitive advantage should be about. There is no competitive advantage in doing what others have done before. To create a meaningful proposition, senior leadership must first understand each of their stakeholders and decide the priority each audience should be given. Stakeholders include more than just customers: employees, investors, partners and suppliers – even the citizens of a country where a brand bases its operations.
Prioritisation, unfortunately, is where many brands fail from the start. While they may pay lip service to their consumers as the force which drives every action of the company, many executives place a higher priority on the price of the company’s stock.
Today’s best brands have wrapped the goals and vision of their company around the needs, values and emotions of their customers. They are in touch with their humanity and evoke emotions that are tied to both conscious and unconscious needs and desires. This does not mean executives should not care at all about shareholder value – they absolutely should. But those who manage sustainably iconic brands understand that financial performance must be driven, first and foremost, by a greater concern for those who buy their products than those who buy their shares. Iconic brands must have a higher purpose – a promise to create a better world somehow.
Assuming a company gets its vision and mission right, how does it become a story? The answer: People. Like any traditional story, characters and heroes must interact with their setting in pursuit of a big idea or challenge that drives the plot. It is with people that a brand’s story must begin. The brand perception, after all, is created out of thousands of experiences with products, services and systems created by people.
Great storytelling outside the company starts with inspiring storytelling internally. Rarely can a brand’s mythology be arbitrarily imposed on employees by marketers. Instead, it should come from meaningful stories from the brand’s history that make it authentic. It should begin with honest, sincere stories people tell within the organisation.
Whether the company is known by their surname or not, so many brands have become synonymous with their famous and legendary founders or key leaders who would not compromise when it came to their personal vision driven by human need. Think of what Steve Jobs, Estée Lauder, Coco Chanel and Walt Disney did for their respective brands, and of the value that Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, Howard Schultz, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Jack Ma built for theirs. They are a few of the founders whose personal story became the brand’s story.
That strength carries a risk: a myth built on one person has to outlive that person. Apple has lived with the question since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011. Giorgio Armani prepared his answer over almost a decade before he died in September 2025, leaving a foundation, bylaws and a will that lay down how the house is to be owned and led without him. The founders who serve their brands best turn a personal story into an institutional one while they still have the authority to do so.
Brands must carefully nurture the culture that perpetuates their brand story. Rewards, process, strategy and structure must effectively support culture. Employees must understand the company’s mission, vision, values and brand promise. They need to know in detail, who the target customers are, what they expect, their needs, desires and, most importantly, how their own role in the organisation contributes to delivering the differentiated customer experiences that are so sought after today.
Organisations should be looking for people who are independently driven to do the best thing for customers. Once they are on board, training systems are needed to reinforce and influence behaviours over time. Only by more closely aligning the hiring processes, compensation systems, training, recognition and measurement schemes by tying them directly to the brand proposition and ideal culture can companies expect to provide an experience true to a brand’s mythology.
An identity myth takes decades to build and can be damaged in a few quarters, so who owns the brand matters as much as who markets it. The tension named at the start of this article, between the long-term perspective an iconic brand needs and the pressure for short-term performance, is resolved at the level of ownership, or not at all.
Look again at the brands named above. Hermès, Chanel, Prada, LEGO and Estée Lauder are family-controlled. L’Oréal and BMW are anchored by long-standing family shareholders. Louis Vuitton and Dior sit inside a group controlled by Bernard Arnault and his family, and Giorgio Armani was in one man’s hands for 50 years. The pattern is no coincidence. Patient ownership gives a brand what a myth needs most: time, consistency and an owner who will not trade the story for a quarter’s earnings.
Three things follow for owner families and founder-led companies.
The family is the custodian of the myth: In a family-controlled brand, the family’s story and the brand’s story are intertwined. Hermès has drawn on six generations of the same family for its narrative of craftsmanship and patience, and the family has become part of the myth. That is an asset and an obligation. The family’s conduct, its unity and its choice of leaders are read by customers as part of the brand. Stewardship of this kind is the family business lens on brand building: the current generation holds the myth in trust for the next.
Succession is narrative succession: When the founder leaves, the brand loses its first storyteller. Chanel shows how a house keeps the founder’s myth alive long after her death. The codes that Gabrielle Chanel created have been reinterpreted by Karl Lagerfeld over 36 years, then by Virginie Viard and, from October 2025, by Matthieu Blazy, with the Wertheimer family, the private owners of the house, as the constant behind each of them. The codes of a myth must be explicit enough to be handed on, and someone must be charged with guarding them. A succession plan that covers the chief executive but not the story is incomplete.
Owners, stewards and operators tell different parts of the story: Family members can be involved in a brand as owners, as stewards on the board, or as operators in management, and the identity myth needs all three. Owners set the horizon and decide what the brand will never do for money. Stewards guard the codes and the values. Operators tell the story every day, in products, stores and service. Where the roles are confused, the myth frays: the founder who cannot delegate, the heir who runs the company as a monument, or the manager who treats the heritage as a marketing asset rather than an obligation. Family unity, harmony and cohesion matter here beyond the family itself. A family divided in public damages the brand’s story as surely as a bad product does.
The message itself is the start, but you cannot forget about the messengers. It is no coincidence that some brands get more word of mouth than others. Dissemination of the brand story is critical for an iconic brand. You can have a great product or service, but without people to perpetuate the mythology on their own, the effectiveness of marketing activities will plateau.
Holt identified four authors of a brand’s story: the company itself, the culture industries of film, music, media and sport, the intermediaries such as retailers and critics, and the customers. Each writes a part of the myth, and none of them, including the company, controls the whole. The culture industries have since been joined by a fifth author, the creators and platforms of social media, who can carry a brand into the culture, or out of it, within days. To give the brand scale and keep messages consistent, brands have to make sure they are speaking to their influencers.
Above all types of influencers, consumers are the most powerful force in marketing. Much of brand communication now travels between people rather than from the brand to the people. The Digital 2026 Global Overview (DataReportal, October 2025) counted 5.66 billion social media user identities, or 68.7% of the world’s population, and Nielsen’s Trust in Advertising study of 2021 found recommendations from people they know to be the most trusted source for nearly nine in ten consumers, ahead of every form of paid media. When considering products, today’s consumers read online reviews, visit stores, and then search for deals and competing offers while in-store. Rating, reviewing and sharing what they buy has become a habit, and for many customers a form of self-expression in its own right.
Even on occasions where brands are not being specifically talked about, they are being recorded, photographed, shared, linked and “liked”. So companies need to arm potential influencers with more than just words and phrases, but experiences and images people will feel passionate enough to capture and send – moments that will speak for themselves without the need for words.
The story also has to be legible to machines. More and more customers meet a brand through an AI-generated answer before they see a store, a campaign or a review, and a myth that lives only in images and atmosphere does not survive that translation. The brands that will be found and described well are those whose story is clear enough to be told in a sentence.
The objective and most important result of developing an iconic brand is not just the sharing, but the growth and strength of brand communities. A brand community is a group of loyal brand customers who are bound together by their loyalty for the brand and what it offers them. Its members rarely meet, yet they recognise one another at once. What sets a brand community apart from a customer base is that its members share rituals, a vocabulary and a sense of obligation to one another. They help newcomers, defend the brand when it is criticised, and expect it to live up to its own story.
There is an intrinsic connection between members and a collective sense of difference from those outside the community. Such a community is not bound by geography, knows itself to be a community, and takes an interest in the survival of the brand that goes beyond the next purchase. Harley-Davidson’s owner groups, the adult fans of LEGO and the collectors of Hermès bags are communities of this kind. A brand can host such a community and feed it. It cannot order one into existence.
A fundamental benefit for the brand is that communities offer real-time feedback, allowing companies to co-create value with them on a continuous basis. Such an environment allows customers to experience the brand in a memorable manner as they are part of the value creation process.
An identity myth is not written once. Holt’s central observation, and the one most often forgotten, is that a myth draws its power from the tensions of a particular moment in a culture, and that the moment passes. Brands that keep telling the same story to a society that has moved on do not become classics. They live on residual brand equity: still recognised, no longer chosen.
Sony is the clearest case. The company that gave the world the Walkman built its myth on inventing categories, and when that stopped being true in the 2000s the brand drifted for a decade. The recovery came with a new story. Under Kenichiro Yoshida, chief executive from 2018, Sony defined its purpose as filling the world with emotion through the power of creativity and technology, and organised itself as a creative entertainment company around games, music, film and image sensors. The PlayStation, not the television, now carries the myth.
Starbucks shows what happens when growth erodes the story. Howard Schultz warned in a 2007 memo that expansion had watered down the experience that made the chain special, and returned as chief executive to restore it. The cycle repeated. In September 2024 a new chief executive, Brian Niccol, opened his tenure by saying that the company had drifted from its core and would return to being the community coffeehouse it was founded to be. A myth of the “third place” between home and work cannot survive an operation built only for speed.
Apple shows renewal of a different kind. The rebel’s story of the Think Different campaign of 1997 belonged to Steve Jobs and to a company on the margins of its industry. Under Tim Cook, Apple has told a story of privacy, craft and an ecosystem that works, which fits one of the most valuable companies in the world. The myth changed. Its core, the belief that technology should serve the person and not the other way round, did not.
Harley-Davidson, Holt’s own example, shows the limit. The myth of the outlaw rider has held for decades, but the company’s most loyal customers have aged faster than the culture that produced them. Winning a new community without losing the old one is the hardest task in brand management.
The brands that renew share two habits. They read the culture and not only the category, so they know which tension the brand resolves today and whether it still exists. And they keep the core of the myth while changing its expression: the Singapore Girl has stood at the centre of Singapore Airlines’ story since 1972 while everything around her has been renewed. Both habits depend on leadership that treats the story as a boardroom matter rather than a marketing one. The chief executive is the chief storyteller, whether or not the title is ever used.
When people believe a brand is worth buying for reasons far greater than its product, price, place or promotion, but because of a transcendent narrative that resonates with a consumer’s core values, businesses have the foundational element of an iconic brand.
Iconicity begins with a mission founded on the true spirit or history of the company, requires product and service performance and profitability, but is ultimately defined by a strong emotional connection that allows customers to express their own unique sense of self through their purchase. Companies whose brands eventually become woven into the cultural fabric of society and become enduring cultural icons have mastered the art of storytelling and nurture communities who perpetuate and contribute to their tale.
For a brand to attain iconic status, it has to create an identity myth driven, first and foremost, by the highest concern for the emotional needs of those who buy their products or services.
Stories now travel between people, and increasingly through machines, faster than any company can manage them. The founders behind many of the brands named here have handed the story on, or are preparing to. And culture moves faster than it did. None of this weakens the argument. It raises the price of getting the story wrong, and it makes the ownership and renewal of the myth a matter for boards and owner families rather than for marketing alone.
For leaders, the implication is direct. Decide what the brand’s story is and what it resolves for the people who buy it. Make its codes explicit enough to hand to a successor. Decide who owns the myth, and give them the time horizon it needs. And watch the culture, not only the competition, for the moment when the story must be told anew. Brands that do these four things become part of the culture. Brands that do not are remembered by it, which is not the same thing.
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About the author: Martin Roll – Global Family Business & Family Office Expert
Read about Giorgio Armani: Giorgio Armani – The Strategy Behind The Iconic Global Fashion Brand
Read about Prada: Prada – How An Italian Family Business Built An Iconic Luxury Brand
Read about Hermès: Hermès – The Strategy Insights Behind The Iconic Luxury Brand
Read about Singapore Airlines: Singapore Airlines – An Excellent, Iconic Asian Brand
Read about stewardship: The Stewardship Imperative: How to Build Multi-Generational Success in Family Business
Read about family business: The 3 Pillars of Success in Family Business: Family Unity, Harmony, and Cohesion
Read about Asian brands: The Essential Features of a Global Asian Brand
Read about brand positioning: How To Create Strong Brand Positioning
Read about leadership and branding: Leadership and Branding – The Role of the CEO
Read more: Insights & Articles
Asian Brand Strategy provides key insights and knowledge about the rising Asian brands incl. model frameworks, brand cases and checklists on Asian branding. Download sample chapter.
