Quando il volto sostituisce la struttura, l'organizzazione smette di possedere ciò che ha costruito.
When Elon bought Twitter in 2022, the value of the Tesla brand began to fluctuate in step with his political statements.
Yet Tesla had not changed a single model, nor lost a single patent. The market was simply reading Tesla through its founder, and every public move by Musk translated into swings in market capitalisation measured in tens of billions of dollars.
Let us take this principle and apply it to X, SpaceX, Boring Company and every business controlled by Elon Musk.
This is the phenomenon of the leader who devours the brand: a structural substitution in which the organisation stops being perceived as an autonomous system and becomes an extension of the person leading it. With the founder’s face that does, yes, strengthen the brand, but only until it replaces it.
But where is the line? How high can the bar be raised before the founder’s stature becomes too much for their own company?
Recognising the signs that precede this and building safeguards that protect the organisation without dissipating the real value of strong leadership is proving a priority for brand governance today, with brands so exposed on social media. Let’s explore why.
When the founder strengthens the brand, and when they replace it
A visible leader is not a problem in itself.
Steve Jobs strengthened Apple for decades precisely through his public presence, and the organisation never stopped being perceived as a system, capable of products, design, retail and a software ecosystem, independently of its founder. Richard Branson built the entire Virgin empire on his public image, and Virgin continued to function as a recognisable brand architecture across sectors ranging from aviation to music.
The difference between a leader who strengthens the brand and a leader who replaces it, therefore, lies not in the founder’s visibility, but in the direction in which meaning flows.
When the leader lends credibility to the organisation, the brand grows stronger.
When the organisation exists only as a projection of the leader, the brand is devoured.
In the first case, the organisation maintains a seemingly autonomous structure: products, values and promises that exist regardless of who shares them with the public.
In the second case, every element of the company passes through the filter of the individual, with statements, personal choices or controversies carrying weight.
How to measure symbolic dependence
A brand’s symbolic dependence on its leader is (partly) measurable.
The first signal is undoubtedly the correlation between the leader’s personal events and movements in brand value.
When a statement, behaviour or private matter involving the founder causes swings in perception or market capitalisation out of proportion to the organisation’s fundamentals, symbolic dependence is already structural (and as proof, I invite you to look at the data presented in the next image).
The second signal is the composition of the media narrative. If the vast majority of editorial coverage of an organisation mentions the founder’s name before the brand’s, the hierarchy has already been inverted. By now, the public no longer thinks of the company that has a leader, but of the leader who (among other things) also happens to own that company.
In short, if the founder’s name precedes the brand’s in the public narrative, the substitution has already taken place.
The third and final signal concerns the organisation’s resilience to a hypothetical departure of the leader.
Organisations with low symbolic dependence can easily set out what would happen to revenue and reputation if their founder left. Organisations with high symbolic dependence, by contrast, cannot: not, at least, with the same confidence.
And not without implying inevitable structural damage.
Behind the substitution
Replacing the brand with the leader cannot be considered an isolated mistake, the result of one or two wrong moves. It is, if anything, a response, a natural response to modern times, with neuroscientific foundations.
Let us start from a premise: the human brain processes a face and a personal story more easily than an abstract organisational architecture.
If I say Mediaset, you think Berlusconi. If I say Amazon, Bezos. Picturing rows upon rows of managers and C-Suite executives is rather harder.
Organisations are complex, multi-layered systems that are hard to picture. A person, by contrast, is a simple cognitive unit: easy to remember, and easier still to follow over time.
This is why, when an organisation communicates mostly through its founder, it is offering the public the perfect cognitive shortcut to being “seen”. The public, for its part, willingly accepts this substitution. And at first the advantage is enormous.
Except that, over time, something is lost. The shortcut does not lead exactly where you wanted to go.
The risks of symbolic dependence
The data are clear (as shown by an analysis in Harvard Business Review): companies led by the public face of their founder outperform the rest. The recent case of the SpaceX IPO proved it. It is, however, a Glass Cannon: while the benefits are clear, the obvious risks must also be pointed out, and they cannot be underestimated.
Here are the main ones:
Concentrated reputational risk
For companies of this kind, every personal controversy risks turning into reputational damage for the entire organisation, even when the episode has no connection whatsoever with the brand in question.
Transition risk
Disney went through years of identity uncertainty after Bob Iger’s departure in 2020, only to bring him back in 2022 precisely because his successor struggled to maintain the same perceived coherence. When an organisation’s success has been told for years as one person’s personal success, the successor inherits an almost impossible task: a truth that many Italian companies, particularly SMEs, live with every day during generational continuity.
Risk of distorted priorities
Brands of this kind tend to favour decisions that increase the founder’s visibility over decisions that would strengthen the organisational structure. There may not even be bad faith behind it, but if the market rewards the leader’s presence more quickly, choices will always gravitate towards them.
Risk of audience polarisation
A persona brand inherits the polarised reactions the person provokes. Those who love or loathe the founder transfer that same emotional reaction onto the organisation. In Italy we have often seen this with people who politically despised Berlusconi and, for that reason, would not watch Mediaset programmes: this says nothing in itself about the company, which pays an indirect price, and sometimes an undeserved one.
How to build an effective safeguard
A clarification: not every leader causes a crisis.
The damage becomes hard to reverse when three conditions coincide: the absence of a brand architecture perceived as autonomous, direct economic dependence on the founder’s personal narrative, and the absence of a succession plan clearly communicated to the market.
The answer to these three risks, then, is not to eliminate the leader’s visibility (not least because, as we have seen, a visible founder remains a very useful financial tool).
No, the answer is to build, in parallel, a brand structure that continues to be perceived as autonomous regardless of that visibility.
The first step is to separate the product narrative from the personal narrative. Communications about quality, innovation and results must be able to exist without the founder’s voice. To achieve this, other internal sources of authority need to be built. Spokespeople, testimonials or measurement tools, for instance.
The second step is to establish a governance structure that precedes and outlives the individual. An organisation that has already set out, before the question becomes urgent, what would happen to its decision-making structure if the founder left, immediately breaks free of that dependence. All of this, of course, is not meant to reduce the leader’s visibility, but rather to support their life and work.
Finally, the third step is monitoring the media narrative. Is the company or the founder cited more often? And in what way? What is being done about it?
Only once these questions have been answered can the current narrative be replaced with a more effective one.
Italian SMEs and home-grown risks
The risk of the leader who devours the brand does not concern only organisations led by personalities with high media exposure. It concerns any structure in which collective identity has not been built with the same care devoted to individual visibility.
A solid brand can coexist with a visible, even controversial, leader. What it cannot afford is to depend on that visibility to exist as a perceived system. The difference between the two conditions becomes apparent at the moment of transition, crisis or controversy, when the organisation must show that it has a structure of its own, independent of the person who for years embodied its public face.
This is a problem we have solved with our founder-independent branding service. Not to favour the leader or the brand, but to strengthen both, each in its own way.
New Connections (FAQ)
How can you tell whether a brand has become too dependent on its leader?
There are three main signals. The correlation between the leader’s personal events and fluctuations in the perception or valuation of the brand. The composition of the media narrative, when the founder’s name systematically precedes the organisation’s in public coverage. The organisation’s ability, or inability, to describe clearly what would happen to its structure if the leader were to leave. When these signals appear together, symbolic dependence is already a structural condition, no longer a potential risk.
Is a visible founder always a risk to the brand?
No. A visible leader strengthens the brand when they lend credibility to an organisation perceived as an autonomous system, able to exist and generate value independently of the person representing it at any given time. It becomes a risk when the organisation has not built, alongside the leader’s visibility, a collective identity that is recognisable in its own right. The problem is not visibility itself, but the absence of a structure to accompany it.
How do you manage the transition when a strongly identifying leader leaves the organisation?
The transition requires preparation that begins long before the leader actually steps down. Bliss manages this handover by building internal sources of authority that do not depend on the founder’s voice, putting the brand’s values, principles and criteria in writing, and communicating to the market an explicit governance that comes before the individual. Organisations that face the transition without this preparation risk an identity crisis that can take years to resolve, regardless of the quality of the chosen successor.