THE RESEARCH
Why do iconic brands feel iconic?
The business behind perception.
WHAT TO EXPECT
The most admired brand in a category is rarely the best product in it. It is the one that decided what it was worth before you could check, and then made everything it showed you agree.
There is a question worth sitting with before you spend another euro on how your business looks. Why do some brands feel inevitable (as though their standing were a fact of nature rather than a series of decisions) while others, often with comparable products, must argue for every sale?
The comfortable answer is that the admired ones are simply better. The watch keeps better time; the car is faster; the hotel is more comfortable. It is intuitive, and it collapses under the lightest pressure. In blind tests the measured gap between the icon and its rivals narrows sharply, and buyers often cannot tell them apart at all. Yet the moment the name is known, preference returns, prices hold, and customers will wait months for the privilege of paying more.
Something other than the product is doing the work. This paper sets out what that something is, why the most admired brands build it deliberately, what it returns to the business that owns it and why the present moment has quietly made it the single most valuable thing a business can own.
CHAPTER I The Admiration Illusion
People decide what something is worth before they can verify it, and that early, unearned judgment does not merely colour their opinion. It changes what they actually experience. This is the mechanism most businesses never account for, and the reason their prices meet resistance.
The evidence is more literal than most founders expect. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers had people taste wine inside a brain scanner while being told the price (1). Some wines were identical; only the number attached to them changed. Told a wine cost forty-five dollars rather than five, subjects reported it as more pleasant and activity in the region of the brain that registers pleasure rose to match. They did not decide to enjoy the expensive wine more. They enjoyed it more. The price had become part of the taste.
THE FINDING MOST BUSINESSES MISS
“Perception is not a coat of paint applied over real value. In large part, perception IS the value. What a customer believes before they buy shapes the satisfaction they feel after they buy. How you are perceived is not a marketing concern downstream of your product, it is upstream of it, and part of what the customer actually receives.”
Adan Chinchilla — Creative Director, LACREM Studio
This is not one odd result. Behavioural economists have argued for years that the perceived value of a thing and its objective qualities are only loosely related. Rory Sutherland has built a career on the point in Alchemy, arguing that the businesses which grasp it quietly outperform those still competing on specifications alone (2). And the effect is not confined to taste: an integrative review in the Journal of Marketing Research found a consistent, positive relationship between price, brand name and the quality buyers perceive (3). Absent perfect information (which is nearly always) the customer reads price and brand as evidence, and believes the evidence they generated themselves.
Here is why this matters commercially, in plain terms. If value is felt before it is proven, the customer arriving at your door has already priced you (from your name, your images, the silence or noise of everything you have published) before a word is spoken. You do not set your price in the negotiation. You set it long before, in how you chose to appear. Most businesses never realise they were the ones who set it low.
CHAPTER II The Four Codes
If the admired brands are not winning on the product, what are they doing that the rest are not? Look closely at how they present themselves (not the logos, the behaviour) and the same four disciplines appear every time, held without exception. They are not a style. They are four refusals.
PERCEPTION
The admired brand controls the first impression completely, because the first impression sets the price the customer thinks is fair. The typeface, the pace of an edit, the light on a product, the pause before a line is spoken (all of it decides), in the customer’s mind, what this company is worth, before they have consciously registered a single choice. Most businesses leave this to chance and then wonder why their prices are questioned. The icon leaves nothing to chance, because it knows the impression is the price.
NARRATIVE
An admired brand never makes you assemble it yourself. A film, a room, a label, a message answered on a Tuesday afternoon, each tells the same story from a different angle. This coherence is commercial: the customer arrives already convinced, because everything they encountered pulled in one direction. A fragmented brand must persuade at the point of sale, the hardest and most expensive place to persuade anyone. This is not a matter of taste, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has shown across categories that what drives choice is less how different a brand is than how easily it is recognised and recalled (4). A coherent brand did its persuading in advance, for free, through consistency.
CRAFT
Craft is invisible until it is missing. A customer cannot always name what feels cheap about a thing (but they feel it, and they price it). The care that goes into the parts nobody consciously notices is read, accurately, as a signal about the parts they cannot check. This is why admired brands pay for a level of finish that looks, on a spreadsheet, like waste. It is not waste. It is the most efficient possible statement that the company is serious and it works precisely because a less serious competitor could not have afforded to make it.
LEGACY
Trends expire on schedule; the admired brands make decisions that will still make sense in ten years, which is why they never seem to age. What you build for this quarter dies with it. What you build on principles compounds. The founder chasing the current format is renting attention that will be repossessed the moment the format changes. The founder building on something durable is buying an asset.
Notice what is not on this list: no colour palette, no typeface, no logo. Those are how a brand transmits its perception, not what makes it iconic. The four codes are strategic and emotional before they are visual, which is exactly why a business cannot buy admiration by buying better graphics. It has to make the four decisions, and then hold them.
CHAPTER III Consistency Is the Multiplier
One beautiful thing changes almost nothing. Five coherent things change everything. The value is not in any single piece, it is in the repetition, and the founders who resist this are the ones paying most for admiration they never accumulate.
There is a reason that runs deeper than taste. The mind rewards what it finds easy to process and mistakes that ease for quality: work in Personality and Social Psychology Review showed that the more fluently something is processed, the more positively it is judged and that people misattribute the ease to the thing itself, not to their own familiarity with it (5). A brand that looks and sounds the same across years is not being repetitive out of a poverty of imagination. It is compounding familiarity into preference, one encounter at a time, in a currency the customer cannot see and cannot resist.
This is why consistency behaves like an investment, not an expense. A single campaign is a cost: it runs, performs, ends, and its effect leaves with it. A decade of coherent communication is an asset: each piece deepens a memory the next one builds on, until the brand holds a position a competitor would need years and a fortune to dislodge. The admired brands look almost monotonous up close (the same principles, again and again) and that monotony is the strategy. They are not paying to be noticed once. They are paying to be remembered at the one moment that matters: when someone is finally ready to buy.
The evidence reaches the balance sheet. Research in the Journal of Financial Economics found that strong brand perception reduces the volatility of a company’s cash flows and improves the terms on which it can borrow and that the effect is stronger for smaller companies, not larger ones (6).
THE POINT THAT REVERSES THE USUAL ASSUMPTION
“A brand is not a luxury a company earns once it is large. On the evidence, it does more for a small company than a big one. It is a mechanism for making a business more predictable and predictability is what the market pays a premium for. The smaller you are, the more that mechanism is worth.”
Adan Chinchilla — Creative Director, LACREM Studio
So the instinct to produce one impressive film, place it, and move on is not a small inefficiency. It misunderstands where value comes from. The impressive film is an event. What you needed was a system, the same intention, expressed again and again, until it stops being a series of things you made and becomes a thing you are.
CHAPTER IV The Age of Infinite Content
Everything above has quietly become more urgent, because the ground shifted beneath every business at once. For the whole history of commerce, producing polished material was expensive and almost no one noticed that the expense was doing a second, silent job. This is the shift almost no one has priced correctly.
A serious piece of communication used to carry an implicit message beneath its surface: someone paid for this, and only a serious company would. The cost itself was the proof. This is not a modern idea, economists established in the Journal of Political Economy that a visibly expensive gesture can be credible precisely because it is expensive: a company expecting to last can afford it, and one selling something inferior cannot recoup it (7). The polish was never only decoration. It was evidence.
That evidence has now evaporated, because the cost of producing polish has collapsed toward nothing. When anyone can generate a competent image, film or paragraph in unlimited quantity at the price of a few minutes, polish stops proving anything at all. The flood does not merely add noise around the signal. It deletes the signal, because the signal was the cost, and the cost is gone.
THE SHIFT THIS PAPER IS BUILT TO NAME
“A signal is credible because it is expensive. Polished communication is no longer expensive. Therefore polish (on its own) has stopped being proof of anything.”
David Hidalgo — Film Director, LACREM Studio
This is the trap the era has laid, and most businesses are walking into it. Able to produce more, cheaper, faster, they produce more, cheaper, faster (pouring effort into the one attribute whose value just fell to zero). They mistake volume for presence. They publish constantly, in a slightly different voice each time, and erode the very consistency that Chapter Three showed was the engine of value. They are working harder than ever to become less distinct.
When production becomes infinite, the scarce thing is no longer production. It is intention, the decision about what is worth making, and what is deliberately left unmade. The restraint to publish one considered thing instead of ten forgettable ones. The refusal, visible and held under pressure, to do what would have been easy and cheap and off-brand. In a world where anyone can make anything, the only remaining evidence that a company is serious is the evidence of what it chose, and what it chose to leave out. Intention is the last thing that cannot be automated, which is exactly why it has become the most valuable thing a brand can show.
CHAPTER V Building Your Crème de la Crème
So the question can be answered plainly. Iconic brands feel iconic not because their products are proportionally better (the blind comparisons settle that) but because every point of contact reinforces the same perception, deliberately, with enough craft that the signal is credible and enough consistency that it compounds, held long enough to seem inevitable.
The feeling of inevitability is not the cause of their status. It is the residue of a thousand aligned decisions the customer never consciously saw.
The liberating part, for a founder, is what this rules out. Admiration is not reserved for the old, the large, or the born-lucky. Every industry has its crème de la crème (the name people pay more for, wait longer for, and remember) and in every industry that position was built, not inherited. The winery, the architecture practice, the property firm, the technology company: each has a version available, and the four codes do not change from one industry to the next. Only their expression does.
Which raises the practical question of medium. If perception is built by making many encounters say the same thing, with feeling, the most valuable tool is the one that transmits the most feeling to the most people in the least time. On the current evidence, that tool is film. Studying the brain during well-directed moving image, neuroscientists writing in Projections found it can align the responses of many different viewers into something close to a shared experience (8); and work in Neuron found that the moments which synchronised viewers most strongly were the ones they still remembered weeks later (9). Craft, measured at the moment of viewing, predicts what survives. That is not a claim about video as content. It is a claim about film as the highest-bandwidth way yet found to make a great many people feel the same thing and remember it.
CHAPTER VI The Two Extremes and the Bridge Between Them
Look at how brands actually use moving image today and they fall into two camps that appear to have nothing in common. Understanding why they are the same move, made from opposite starting points, is how a business finds its own way in.
At one extreme are the brands that were, in effect, born fluent (Porsche, Rolex, Mercedes-Benz and their peers). They inherited decades of accumulated perception, and their film work simply maintains it: every piece speaks the codes the brand already owns, so the job is continuity, not construction. At the other extreme sit brands with no inherited codes at all, building perception from nothing. The instructive fact is that the second group, when it gets this right, uses exactly the same principles as the first.
Consider the eyewear brand Lohause. A little over a year before this was written, its social communication looked like most small brands; product shots, offer announcements, forgettable clips averaging around twelve thousand views. Then it rebuilt everything around a single recurring character and one consistent narrative idea, and its average moved toward half a million views, with individual films far beyond that10. The product did not change. The glasses were the same glasses. What changed was that every piece now said the same thing, in the same voice, with enough craft and consistency to compound (the exact mechanism of Chapter Three), applied by a company nobody would have called iconic.
CASE IN POINT: THE SMALL BRAND THAT BUILT ITS CODES
“Lohause did not out-spend anyone. It out-decided them. One character, one idea, held consistently, until a scattered feed became a recognisable brand with a face. This is the proof that the disciplines of the icons are not gated by size or heritage. They are gated by the decision to hold a single perception, on purpose, over time.”
David Hidalgo — Film Director, LACREM Studio
The same logic now runs at the top of the market, in the opposite direction. Even a brand as large as Zara (which by public account spends only a small fraction of its revenue on conventional advertising) increasingly communicates through short films crafted like cinema, working with directors and photographers drawn from the film and editorial worlds11. A mass-market label reaches upward toward the codes of a boutique; a small independent reaches from zero toward the codes of the established. They are moving toward the same place from opposite ends, and using the same tool to get there: film, applied with intention and held with consistency.
WHY THE TWO EXTREMES ARE THE SAME MOVE
“One brand inherited its codes and protects them. Another built its codes from nothing. The principles they apply are identical, which is exactly why any ambitious business, at any size, can apply them too.”
Jose Gómez — VFX Director, LACREM Studio
This is the space a studio works in: between the brand that already looks like what it is, and the brand that does not yet look like what it is becoming. The first needs its perception protected. The second needs its perception built. Both are the same craft (translating a set of principles into moving image that a viewer feels and remembers) pointed in opposite directions.
CHAPTER VII The Return on Brand
Everything this paper has described costs money and takes discipline. A founder is entitled to ask the obvious question: what does it return? The honest answer is richer than the question, and it is the reason this chapter refuses to give you a formula.
Ask what a film returns and you are measuring the wrong asset. A film is an event; the brand it builds is the asset and the returns accrue to the asset, not the event. Three of those returns run through everything this paper has shown. Prices that hold: if perceived value forms before proof (Chapter One), then perception is doing silent work in every negotiation you enter (the brand that is perceived as worth more is argued with less). Clients who arrive convinced: a coherent brand does its persuading in advance, for free, through consistency (Chapters Two and Three) which shows up in the pipeline as shorter conversations and better-fitting clients. And financial calm: the evidence from the Journal of Financial Economics that strong brand perception stabilises cash flows and improves the terms on which a company borrows an effect stronger, not weaker, for smaller companies (6).
There is a fourth return, and it is the one the spreadsheet never sees. Among the owners of established companies (the businesses that have run for decades and no longer need to prove anything) the evidence is striking: in PwC’s most recent global survey of family businesses, protecting the company (78%) and preserving its legacy (77%) rank above generating dividends (68%) as the owners’ primary goals (12). Scholars have a name for what these owners are protecting: socioemotional wealth, the identity, continuity and reputation bound up in the firm, which family businesses demonstrably preserve even at financial cost (13). For this owner, the return on brand is not another point of growth. It is the company finally looking like what it took a lifetime to build; a name the next generation wants to sign; the part of the estate that transfers (to heirs or to an acquirer) with the multiplier attached. Accounting treats brand as an expense. It behaves like the only asset a company builds that keeps returning value years after the work is done.
THE REFUSAL THAT KEEPS THIS HONEST
“You will meet people who promise to measure this who will sell you a “brand ROI” of 3.2x, to one decimal place. Be suspicious of the decimal. Perception cannot be isolated in an attribution model; anyone offering that precision is selling the feeling of measurement, not measurement.”
Adan Chinchilla — Creative Director, LACREM Studio
What can be honestly observed is the direction of the returns: prices meeting less resistance, sales conversations shortening, the quality of who walks in the door, the terms when capital or buyers examine the business. We call this the return on brand. We will never attach a formula to it and in a paper that has cited its sources for every claim, that refusal is the most honest number we can give you.
IN CLOSING Look Like What You Are Becoming
This is the principle a studio like LACREM works from: an independent creative studio, built between Barcelona and Marbella by people who spent more than a decade behind brands that understood all of this.
The work is not to imitate the admired brands, imitation copies the surface and misses the mechanism. It is to understand why they feel the way they feel, and to build that same feeling, deliberately, into a brand still becoming what it intends to be, so that it looks today like the company it is on its way to being.
That work sits across the whole range this paper has described from brands whose codes are already established and need protecting, to brands building their perception from the ground up. The starting points differ. The craft does not.
Because the crème de la crème isn’t born. It’s built. And a brand, unlike a product, is one of the few things a company can build that keeps returning value for years after the work is done, quietly making prices easier to hold, clients easier to win, and the whole enterprise easier to believe in. The only question a founder has to answer is whether that building happens by design, or by accident.
“The businesses you admire answered it by design. That is the entire difference.”
SOURCES
Every finding in this paper is drawn from a primary source: a peer-reviewed journal, a major professional survey, or a named published work. Where an argument is widely made but could not be traced to a specific study, it is stated as argument, not evidence. No statistic here was invented.
01 Plassmann, H., O’Doherty, J., Shiv, B. & Rangel, A. (2008). “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness.” PNAS, 105(3), 1050–1054. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0706929105
02 Sutherland, R. (2019). Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life. Referenced as a published argument. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1113665/alchemy-by-sutherland-rory/9780753556528
03 Rao, A. R. & Monroe, K. B. (1989). “The Effect of Price, Brand Name, and Store Name on Buyers’ Perceptions of Product Quality.” Journal of Marketing Research, 26(3), 351–357. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002224378902600309
04 Romaniuk, J., Sharp, B. & Ehrenberg, A. (2007). “Evidence concerning the importance of perceived brand differentiation.” Australasian Marketing Journal, 15(2), 42–54. https://www.marketingscience.info/wp-content/uploads/staff/2015/08/different.pdf
05 Reber, R., Schwarz, N. & Winkielman, P. (2004). “Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver’s processing experience?” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 364–382. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3
06 Larkin, Y. (2013). “Brand perception, cash flow stability, and financial policy.” Journal of Financial Economics, 110(1), 232–253. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304405X13001608
07 Milgrom, P. & Roberts, J. (1986). “Price and Advertising Signals of Product Quality.” Journal of Political Economy, 94(4), 796–821. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/261408
08 Hasson, U., Landesman, O., Knappmeyer, B., Vallines, I., Rubin, N. & Heeger, D. J. (2008). “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film.” Projections, 2(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.3167/proj.2008.020102
09 Hasson, U., Furman, O., Clark, D., Dudai, Y. & Davachi, L. (2008). “Enhanced Intersubject Correlations During Movie Viewing Correlate with Successful Episodic Encoding.” Neuron, 57(3), 452–462. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2007.12.009
12 PwC (2025). 12th Global Family Business Survey. Primary goals of family business owners: safeguarding the business (78%), preserving the family’s legacy (77%), generating dividends (68%). https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2025/pwc-global-family-business-survey.html
13 Gómez-Mejía, L. R., Cruz, C., Berrone, P. & De Castro, J. (2011). “The Bind that Ties: Socioemotional Wealth Preservation in Family Firms.” Academy of Management Annals, 5(1), 653–707. https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/19416520.2011.593320
Publicly reported brand behaviour (cited as observable behaviour, not as audited data):
10 Lohause (independent eyewear brand, Portugal). Reported shift from ~12,000 to ~500,000 average video views after rebuilding communication around a single recurring character, 2024–2026. DesignRush, May 2025, and marketing commentary. https://news.designrush.com/lohause-showcases-its-unique-brand-identity-in-slice-of-life-social-media-ad-series
11 Zara (Inditex). Widely reported minimal conventional-advertising spend alongside high-craft short films with cinema-associated directors and photographers, 2023–2026. Trade and fashion press. https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-features/zara-marks-50-years-tribute-first-store-steven-meisel-film-1237689738/
Let's build something worth remembering.
Let's build something worth remembering.