I’m not about to define a brand, I’d be wasting your time as there are plenty of marketing books to do that. I am about to talk about some qualities that many brands used to have, and more importantly the features that tomorrow’s hero brands do have.
function first
reliable consistency
thin product range
you’ll travel to buy it
limited distribution
you found out about it by recommendation
limited if any advertising expenditure
no external branding
you don’t care if people don’t know your using it
often founder defined
An example for me personally is Herringbone shirts. A Sydney based shirt company. Their specialty is shirts. 
They’re expensive, but the quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten. Only those who have one would know you’re wearing it. We know the cut, the feel, the fabric and they just sit like quality garments should.
A lot of global brands once fit the above description. Then due to the brand’s own success they simply became ‘corporations’. Once this happens, the rot sets in. They go public, product ranges get expanded, the founder loses control or sells out (as they deserve to), production is outsourced, quality is compromised, distribution is expanded, branding becomes overt and crass, sales targets must be met, prices get cut, customer basses expand, the product adapts to the larger vanilla consumer…. – rinse and repeat. Until their core consumer moves on.
Outrageous commercial success often predicates a brand’s inevitable decline because it is hard to retain the focus that drove the success in the first instance.
What is your – yesterday’s hero brand?
What is your – tomorrow’s hero brand?
hmmm.. interesting post.. I really liked how you broke that story of brand deterioration down.. we are seeing that in other fields as well, not just in the fashion industry..
yesterdays hero brand has to be Google.. i had so much faith that they would stick to their mission statement and teach the world that the most important thing a brand can do is strive to create value for its consumers and not just its shareholders..
future hero brand, Microsoft hahahaha…. yeah, the things they have done with the xbox 360, the way they are taking chances on windows 8, leads me to believe that they are pushing for innovation.. if they continue to take chances and push forward they will continue to grow and forever change (perhaps) that stale corporate identity of a few years ago