WHAT IF THE FUTURE OF BRANDS LIES IN THEIR IDEAL ?

 

This week, for the 24th consecutive year, I will be teaching a course entitled “Brand Idea and Brand Territory” as part of my branding program at Sciences Po Paris (Paris Institute of Political Studies). Created in 2008, this course explores the meaning, appearance, and experience of brands. Over time, it has evolved into a course on engaged brands, that I teach it in English, alongside three former students of the course who are now pursuing successful international careers: Vallari Accava Cariapa, Nina Kurose, and Grant Fega. Over the years spent advising brands, I have seen their discourse evolve profoundly. Substantively, through a growing desire to integrate social and societal issues; but above all formally, with the massive rise of digital content. Their status has also changed, with corporate brands progressively taking precedence over commercial brands. And yet, paradoxically, brands today, especially consumer brands, seem to be investing ever more effort and resources for increasingly limited impact. The annual Meaningful Brands study published by Havas Group highlights this reality with almost brutal consistency: the majority of brands could disappear without significantly affecting people’s lives. Not because they are useless, but because they have become interchangeable, indistinct, devoid of perspective. They are more or less useful, sometimes responsible, often well-intentioned, but rarely structuring. Above all, they have gradually stopped playing a clear cultural role: producing shared references, narratives, and worldviews capable of helping individuals make sense of an era that has become increasingly fragmented and confusing. This leads us to a fundamental question: how can brands today fully reclaim a driving role and once again become essential to the success of organizations and businesses, by embedding themselves durably in people’s minds and hearts? For a long time, I have been convinced that brands must do more than carry strong ideas : they must embody a true ideal. An ideal understood as a desirable vision of the world, capable of mobilizing people, providing direction, and creating lasting attachment. An ideal that does not merely explain what a brand does, but clearly states what it stands for, and, just as importantly, what it stands against. In other words, an ideal that makes the brand more than a differentiation tool: a genuine cultural compass, both for the company and for the individuals it addresses. This question is anything but abstract. It has become urgent if brands are to recover their essential role and cultural relevance. It is in this context that I created IDEALIST Paris, a strategic planning agency whose name was chosen very deliberately. Still, we must first agree on what we mean today by brand ideal. Because an ideal is neither purpose, nor utility, nor mission, nor even engagement. It is something else altogether — more demanding, and above all, more generative.

BRANDS IN SEARCH OF MEANING.

When we examine what brands are trying to express today, beyond their products, services, or commitments, we find that the notion of an ideal is rarely articulated explicitly. And yet it runs through much of branding literature over the past twenty years. As if something were sensed, intuited, approached… but never fully named. Most people are familiar with Simon Sinek’s approach, popularized in 2009 with Start With Why. His intuition is both simple and powerful: the brands that matter are those that can articulate why they exist, beyond what they do or how they do it. The “why” allows brands to move beyond functional differentiation and connect with belief, cause, and founding intention. But as fertile as this framework is, it remains focused on origin and intent rather than projection. It clarifies the starting point, not always the horizon. A few years later, Jim Stengel, former Chief Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble, took the idea further in Grow (2011) by explicitly introducing the notion of a “brand ideal.” Stengel shows that the most successful long-term brands are those that serve a fundamental human ideal : freedom, joy, progress, connection. For the first time, the ideal is clearly linked to business growth and performance. Yet this ideal often remains broad, consensual, almost universal, sometimes at the risk of dissolving into vague values. It is precisely this vagueness that Douglas Holt addresses in How Brands Become Icons (2004) and later in Cultural Strategy (2020). Holt does not speak directly of ideals, but he describes their most effective mechanism. For him, iconic brands are those that take a stance in response to deep cultural tensions of their time. They do not simply promote values; they offer symbolic resolutions, narratives, and desirable ways of inhabiting the world. In Holt’s work, the ideal is never abstract. It is situated, conflictual, and culturally charged. All these approaches have significantly expanded the role of brands. Yet they leave one crucial question largely unresolved: how can we think of the ideal not merely as intention, value, or responsibility, but as a structuring cultural engine — one capable of projecting a desirable worldview, creating lasting preference, and re-energizing brands by fostering genuine adhesion?

THE CHALLENGE IS NO LONGER UTILITY, BUT CULTURAL UTILITY.

The real challenge for brands today is no longer to be useful. That is the role of their products and services, which simplify, optimize, and facilitate daily life. Many brands, though still far from all, have also become more responsible and attentive to their impact. And yet something is missing. Because product or service utility, however necessary, is no longer sufficient to create deep attachment, lasting preference, or shared meaning. What is missing is a different kind of utility: cultural utility. Not the ability of a brand to satisfy a need, but its ability to help individuals orient themselves in the world — to project themselves, make choices, and shape a desirable way of living, consuming, working, moving, and relating to others. In other words, a brand’s ability to act as a mediator between individuals and their era. This is where my conception of brand ideal differs sharply from most existing frameworks. Where purpose expresses a moral intention, mission defines a contribution, and engagement seeks legitimacy, the ideal functions as a compass. It does not merely state what the brand does or supports; it expresses the world the brand seeks to make desirable, and how it invites people to participate in it. A brand ideal is neither a decorative “soul” nor an ethical veneer. It is a principle of movement. It guides decisions, inspires narratives, prioritizes choices, and creates coherence over time. This is precisely what we observe in truly iconic brands. Nike has never built its power on athletic performance alone, but on a deeply democratic vision of achievement — anyone can push their limits, regardless of background or body type. Patagonia does more than sell technical apparel; it embodies an ideal of active restraint and responsibility toward the living world, even when that challenges its own growth model. Apple did not merely make technology more accessible; it placed individual creativity, intuition, and attention to detail at the heart of the relationship between humans and technological systems. LEGO, for decades, has reminded us that imagination, play, and construction are fundamental cultural skills, far beyond childhood. What these brands share is not a stack of values or commitments, but a structuring ideal — sometimes polarizing, always legible — that genuinely sets something in motion. They do not merely seek to be useful, liked, or responsible; they seek to matter, to orient, and to leave a lasting cultural imprint.