A brand perspective on a hundred years of the Mother Road

Route 66 turns a hundred in 2026. It was never designed as a symbol. It began as an argument over a number. A businessman from Oklahoma wanted the round 60 for his link from Chicago to the Pacific, Kentucky claimed it first, and 66 was what remained. Three decades later the interstates made the road redundant. In 1985 it was struck from the register. Economically it was finished.

And then it became famous.

In my opinion, that sequence is the interesting part, and it holds four lessons for anyone responsible for a brand.

I - Meaning and utility are two different assets

The road owes its fame to the fact that nobody needs it any more. It lost its function and gained its myth.

For most brands the reverse risk is the live one: keeping the function and losing the meaning. Product, price, distribution and convenience can all be matched inside a quarter. Meaning cannot be copied at the same speed, and it is the asset most companies manage least deliberately.

A useful test: if your product became commercially irrelevant tomorrow, would anyone miss the brand? If the answer is no, the meaning was never built.

II - The core holds. The expression moves.

Harley-Davidson has stood for freedom since 1903. What has changed is what freedom looks like. In 1969 it was Easy Rider: the open road and the promise of leaving convention behind. In 1991 it was a Fat Boy in Terminator 2, freedom fused with technology and the future. Same core, different cultural argument.

Most brand failures are not failures of consistency. They are failures of translation. A core that is still true gets expressed in a language the next generation does not speak. The discipline is to know exactly which layer is fixed and which is negotiable, and to write that down before a campaign deadline forces the decision for you.

III - Authenticity is a constraint

Authenticity has become something brands claim in copy. It is far more useful as a rule about what you will not do.

The handful of people who put the Route 66 signs back up after 1985 were not running a campaign. They were refusing to let something go. That is the whole mechanism. A workable definition: authenticity is the list of decisions you are prepared to lose money on. If that list is empty, the word is decoration.

IV - Myth is not a business model

This is the part the romance leaves out. Route 66 is a strong myth and a weak economy. The neon is back on and the visitors come from all over the world, but the towns along it are still small. Harley-Davidson carries one of the most recognisable brands anywhere and still faces an ageing rider base and a demanding shift to new products and new customers.

Meaning buys attention and permission. It does not buy growth. So the job is two-sided: protect what must not change, and do the harder commercial work of earning relevance with people who were not there for Easy Rider.

Three questions for your next brand review

• What is the one thing about us that must still be true in ten years, in a sentence a new joiner could repeat back?
• Where are we expressing that truth in a language our next generation of customers does not use?
• What would we refuse to do for a quarter of additional revenue?

Here is the PDF with the full article as published.

The road runs dead straight towards a horizon that never gets any closer all day. That turned out to be the point. The full essay on Route 66 at a hundred appeared in Weltwoche No. 27.26.