Constituted by the past, not enslaved by it

Building the future without abandoning what matters.

In "Amarelo, Azul e Branco", Rita Lee (1947–2023), the Brazilian rock goddess for six decades, penned one of the most lucid observations on the relationship between identity and memory:

To my past
I owe my knowledge and my ignorance
My needs, my relationships
My culture and my body.
What space does my past leave for my freedom today?
I am not its slave.

As a brand positioning strategist, these verses resonate because they uphold two simultaneous truths without diluting either: the past constitutes us, but it does not enslave us. On the contrary, it provides the very map toward freedom for those willing to respect it.

In management, those who fail to respect these places, whether through incompetence or strategic lethargy, end up losing either their past or their future. Eventually, they lose both.

A false dichotomy of choice

Academic literature on Brand Heritage treats the subject with balance, yet management practice often reduces the discussion to a binary choice: do we preserve history or do we reinvent the brand?

This urge to simplify the equation is understandable. Beyond the inherent complexity of the topic, a "conservative" or "disruptive" stance is much easier to defend before a board focused solely on quarterly figures.

The reality is that choosing only one side - fixating on the past or pivoting blindly toward the future - comes at a steep price.

The first trap treats the past as a museum.

Every inherited element is sacred: the palette, the monogram, the tone of voice, the product category. Nothing is interactive; alarms go off if you get too close. This collection of "no-gos" makes the brand experience stagnant. The brand immobilizes itself in reverence to what it once was, and the market eventually abandons it for irrelevance.

The second trap treats the past as a burden. This is often driven by executive ego.

With every new CEO, CMO, or Creative Director, the brand is reinvented from scratch, as if its prior history were a contagious disease. The result is a chaotic sequence of overlapping personalities: no continuity, no recognition capital and no long-term equity building.

Both errors fail for the same reason: they mistake heritage for rigidity. They treat the past as an indivisible block that must be either entirely preserved or entirely discarded.

Style was never the question

Gucci, under Alessandro Michele (2015-2022), embraced the past as a spectacle. Maximalism, a saturation of historical references and an aesthetic of excess treated heritage as an inexhaustible reservoir. It worked commercially for years until it reached a breaking point. When sales stagnated, the internal diagnosis was that the brand was collapsing under the weight of its own identity.

The correction came with Sabato De Sarno in 2023, hired with an explicit mandate to return to the brand’s “universal and iconic qualities”. Minimalist silhouettes, restricted tailoring, and wardrobe essentials replaced visual manifestos.

By February 2025, just two years later, De Sarno was out. Gucci’s revenues had plummeted 25% in Q3 2024. The CEO of Kering described De Sarno’s work as a "palate cleanser": an elegant way of admitting the repositioning failed to resonate.

While most see a crisis of creative direction, a deeper look reveals something else. Both Michele and De Sarno represented opposite extremes of the same past, and both failed for the same reason: neither distinguished between what was constitutive in Gucci’s heritage and what was merely circumstantial. Michele treated everything as immutable; De Sarno treated everything as narrative.

What Jobs got right

The most instructive contrast comes from 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. He had to decide what to do with a brand on the brink of bankruptcy after a decade of failed modernization attempts.

In a recorded internal meeting, Jobs articulated the distinction that the Gucci cases lacked:

“A lot of things have changed. The market is a totally different place than it was a decade ago, and Apple is totally different... And believe me, the products and the distribution strategy and the manufacturing are totally different and we understand that. But values and core values, those things shouldn't change”.

Jobs didn’t choose between preservation and reinvention. He merged the layers.

Products, distribution, and manufacturing were circumstantial. Therefore, they had to change. But what should remain? Apple’s core belief, the bet on people who think differently, on individual creativity against technical consensus, was the constitutive pillar. And it was still there.

The "Think Different" campaign was the public translation of this distinction. It didn’t "go back" to Apple’s past; it recovered what made Apple, clearing the dust away. The brand emerged recognizable, new and innovative simultaneously.

A framework for moving forward

To lead a brand effectively, one must ask:

What part of who we are sustains what we might become and what part survives only through inertia?

This requires three distinct strategic operations:

1. Identify the Constitutive: this is the brand's DNA. If removed, the brand ceases to exist. It is rarely the logo or the color palette; it is usually a stance, a specific bet on the world, or a decision-making criterion that remains stable across leadership cycles.
   
2. Identify the Circumstantial: these are elements that exist due to the context of the time: a dated aesthetic, a distribution channel that once made sense and/or a customer profile that is no longer the target. This must be labeled as circumstantial or it will be defended as heritage.
   
3. Identify the Residual: this is what survives simply because no one had the courage to question it. It isn't constitutive and it wasn't a choice, just inertia. Residue is not equity, but a weight that reduces the brand's ability to move.

Brands that master these three distinctions gain a rare superpower: the freedom to change without betraying themselves and the discipline to remain consistent without becoming immobile.

Back to Rita

Rita Lee never said the past was light.

She said it was constitutive and yet she refused to be its slave.

Sustaining both assertions at once is what makes a brand genuine. Our experiences, viewpoints and the core beliefs we hold are the foundation stones of our future. The circumstances that brought us here, however, may no longer serve us.

As Heraclitus famously noted: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man”.

Thank you, Rita.

_

¹ The original text was extracted from the book Force of Circumstance, published in 1963 and authored by Simone de Beauvoir, who was married to Jean-Paul Sartre.