Ursula & brand identity

I've just finished reading DH Lawrence's The Rainbow.

What struck me is that Ursula thinks she's alone in her desire to rise socially and be independent, but in fact we know that she is the product of several generations of ambition.

Ursula may be only vaguely aware of her ancestral farmworkers, but early on in the book, Lawrence privileges the reader with a development of these characters and their dreams of social success.

Although the initial impetus for ambition has been forgotten by Ursula's generation, and the conceivers of ambition are long dead, it is that seed of ambition that has passed down, and enabledUrsula to go to school, enjoy education, and believe that she can go further.

I'm now going to make a tenuous link to branding.

Corona is a cool beer. I don't know why it's cool, I'm guessing it's something to do with the gimmicky lime you have to poke through the bottle neck. But I wouldn't feel cool putting a lime in a Stella, so it must be something else.

I must have learned it. At some point in my bar/pub experience, I must have sub-consciously grasped that Corona was cool, compared to other beers. And whoever demonstrated to me that Corona was cool, must have learned it from someone else in another bar/pub.

Just like Ursula mistakenly thought her ambition came out of nowhere, Corona's cool factor must have originated somewhere.

Douglas Holt tells the story in his book, How Brands Become Icons.

Corona was a cheap Mexican beer, which became successful when hedonistic US college students went to the beaches of Mexico on vacation. When they returned to college, they drank Corona to remind them of the sun and debauchery they had experienced there. Other college students took on this association of Corona and partying, and so the myth spread.

Holt explains that brands such as Corona, CocaCola or Volkswagen became iconic within our culture by creating myths around their brands that "address the collective anxieties and desires of a nation".

I'd like to suggest, using Ursula as an analogy, that true (brand) identity occurs when history is stripped away, and what is left is an essence that is simply known, but not necessarily understood.