Soundtrack for this article: Ulver, So Falls the World
You know the saying:
“As Colossus stands, so shall Rome.
When Colossus falls, Rome shall fall.
And when Rome falls, so falls the world.”
Well, the same is true of brands.
For centuries, Colossus has embodied the fragility of empires erected upon symbols, those immense figures that appear eternal until a single fracture reveals their emptiness. Nero’s bronze giant once loomed beside the Flavian Amphitheater, so imposing that its shadow gave the building its very name, the Colosseum. In time, the statue was dismantled, its metal melted, its memory fading into whispers. The prophecy that tied its fall to the fall of Rome became less prediction than retrospective allegory, a myth read backwards onto ruins. The statue was gone, the empire decayed, and people saw in one absence the mirror of the other (and sorry for the history lesson but My “Roman Empire” is THE ACTUAL Roman Empire…).
Fast forward to our (sad) present, and the Colossus is no longer bronze but digital, not a monument of metal but a substrate of indexes, queries, and algorithms where the survival of identity is decided in milliseconds. The analogy is all here: a brand without digital gravity is Rome without its Colossus, monumental in appearance yet fatally unstable at its core.
And the tragedy is that many agencies continue to behave as if this Colossus did not exist. They polish logos, refine palettes, and compose sleek manuals as if we still lived in the age of print, believing semiotic elegance can substitute for existential relevance. But the battlefield has shifted. A brand is no longer born in brochures or in the contemplative gaze of the consumer. It is forged in search results, in auctions of attention, in the hidden architecture of algorithmic interpretation and LLMs. To ignore this is not simply naïve, it is malpractice.
The “Iberian Peninsula” Catastrophe
I witnessed the consequences firsthand with a client of mine (who is soon to be a former one). A boutique hotel in Madrid, once among the strongest in its portfolio, was seduced into renaming itself with a phrase that shimmered on paper, poetic in sound, culturally evocative, visually sophisticated. The proposal came from an agency with no understanding whatsoever of the digital landscape. They thought in glyphs and palettes, not in algorithms and queries.
Online, the new name collapsed instantly, as it was already occupied by an architecture project with established search authority, by a psychotherapy studio with active traction, and, most disastrously, by a town more than two hundred kilometers away from the city where the hotel is. These are the kinds of things one might imagine worth checking before proposing a rebrand, yet apparently they were not. The results were immediate and brutal. Algorithms faced with identical terms were forced to disambiguate, and the hotel, stripped of authority, sank beneath the weight of competitors that had nothing to do with hospitality. Paid campaigns bled into semantic irrelevance, serving users looking for real estate or therapy sessions instead of hotel rooms. Cost per direct acquisition doubled, organic visibility was cut by two thirds, and traffic collapsed in less than six months.
— Source: Hospitality Net
I strongly advised against it. Nobody listened. And, as foretold, Rome fell.
The Digital Colossus
This collapse is not mysterious, it is structural. Google Ads does not sell space, it sells alignment. Quality Score is its silent executioner, weighing expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page integrity. When the brand name itself evokes the wrong city, the algorithm reads the dissonance and retaliates. Budgets are drained into irrelevance, cost per click spirals, and every euro buys less attention.
SEO is equally unforgiving. Authority, intent, and uniqueness are the pillars. A brand name that points in too many directions fractures authority, and each click becomes a wound. And this is no abstract theory. I have seen hotels on Lake Como drowned by Americans searching “Bellagio” and finding Las Vegas first. I have seen Parisian properties burn budgets into oblivion by including “Eiffel” in their name, competing against tickets, queues, and restaurants. Chantilly hotels that pretended to be Paris ended up invisible in both. The algorithm does not forgive illusions, let alone delusions.
The lesson is brutal. A name is not a word, it is (also) a query, whether we like it or not. A logo is not an image, it is (also) a Quality Score. To treat a rebrand otherwise is to build empires of sand. Agencies that ignore this truth act like architects who forget gravity exists, generals who go to war without maps. Their Rome is majestic, but without its Colossus, well… you should know it by now.
Toward a Digital Consciousness
If branding wishes to matter in this century, it must awaken to digital consciousness. Every naming exercise must be pressure-tested against SERP composition, LLM suggestions, intent landscapes, and auction dynamics. Every rebrand must live first in the ecosystem of algorithms and only then in the theater of boardrooms. Without this, the brand is already dead, a statue without a pedestal.
A name that fails in digital reality does not exist, no matter how beautifully it is drawn. The Colossus of today is made not of marble or bronze but of algorithms, queries, and machine logics.
When it stands, the brand stands.
When it falls, the brand falls with it.
Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant!
Simone Puorto
Hospitality Net
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