Beyond Legacy
Once in a while, someone asks a question that cuts through the noise. Challenging, probing — even if accompanied by a mischievous glint, it’s a grade of inquiry that demands reflection. We were recently asked such a question while explaining the true meaning of creating legacy.
We find that brands with a drive to create a positive, lasting change for the environment, people or society tend to have the legs to carry them through the differentiation trap that many brands face. Consequently, they tend to stick around long enough to have a meaningful impact on the world, which is to achieve legacy.
Following this little explication, our client asked, with a twinkle in his eye: “and what is beyond legacy?” Despite the question’s apparent illogicality (what’s beyond beyond?) we were unable to shake it off. The question seemed to be about the scope of our ambition. A place “beyond legacy” would contain opportunities to have an even greater positive influence on communities, society and the environment. If that exists, then we want to take our clients towards it. So what is it like, this Shangri-La of legacy? Perhaps it can be glimpsed by looking at the world’s most influential businesses.
Smoothie brand Innocent is more about fun than fruit. Bouncing onto the scene in 1999, with a mission “to make drinks that make it easy to do yourself some good”, Innocent revolutionised not only the food and beverage sector but marketing and communications, too. Today, shades of the brand’s friendly, personal tone of voice are heard from businesses in every sector. Innocent also kick-started a global health beverages sector that has turned the supermarket soft drinks aisle into a parade of ethical elixirs. Even the brand’s controversial surrender to ownership by Coca-Cola has been a success, casting Innocent’s halo across the fizzy drinks megalith, as though Satan had adopted Lassie…(they do in fact have a yoghurt-based drinks line.) Arguably, many of the brands that owe their existence to Innocent are more ethical and healthful than the smoothie-king, which is as it should be. Innocent spawned a thousand children, each building on the original’s founding mission with their own legacy-driving ideas.
We believe that inspiring this kind of proliferation places a brand ‘beyond legacy’. If this proliferation sounds like the dreaded differentiation trap, the distinction is this: instead of inviting others to emulate their product or service, brands with a well-articulated purpose inspire others to espouse the same values, which they tend to pursue in their own ways.
Danish restaurant Noma is another whose influence spread far and wide. Opened in 2009, Noma wasn’t on a mission, as such — “we were just opening a restaurant”, founder René Redzepi told The Guardian in 2017. But a couple of lightbulb moments sparked Noma’s quest to put Danish cuisine, made from locally sourced and foraged ingredients, on the map. The world loved Danish ingredients (sea buckthorn has even found its way into shampoo), but even more, it loved Noma’s underpinning value: localism. Over the course of a decade, Noma has inspired a global food and drink movement based on the values of local, forageable, artisan and rediscoverable, enriching and making more sustainable the food cultures of nations across the world. Embedding positive changes in the way ordinary people think, feel and behave, is the ultimate goal of creating legacy.
Cultural influence crowns legends. When Iraq-born architect Zaha Hadid was studying, architects of her gender in the UK were referred to as ‘women architects’ — so rare as to be freakish. With her determination and “unbuildable” designs, Hadid not only redrew architecture but helped to redress the profession’s extreme gender imbalance. In 2000 (four years before she accepted the first-ever Pritzker Prize awarded to a woman), just 13% of architects were female. Today, a third of architects employed by the UK’s biggest 100 practices are women. It’s a huge leap forward, but most agree that there is more to be done.
Cultural change tends to be slow, and time can be short. A sense of urgency can galvanise the radical and innovative brands to up-end convention. In an astonishing Judo-move called The Roadster, sustainable mobility brand Tesla upended the performance car sector — previously fossil-fuelled by machismo — and made electric cars sexy (three words not previously seen together). Similarly, the reputationally-smeared high street banking industry was shaken up in 2015 with the launch of the crowd-funded bank Monzo. This digital-only bank promises to be “a new kind of bank” that gives its customers a say in corporate decisions from its brand name to which products it will offer, via a community forum that is tellingly called the Transparent Roadmap. Monzo has been followed onto the scene by other online-only banks, driven by similar values of transparency and honesty.
These pioneers and reformers educate in the truest sense of the world — not by filling with knowledge, but by drawing out the best tendencies in others. They inspire, breathing across their own fire to scatter sparks that begin new, small fires of change.
So we would like to thank our client for asking a simple, brilliant question. Like him, let’s keep challenging each other to reach beyond legacy.
