The Rebel:
Harley-Davidson, Red Bull, Virgin, and the sale of defiance

Chris Rubin · 2023 · updated 2026-09-30

Part of a series that started with Why some brands move us, and continued with the Innocent. This one is the Innocent's opposite.

Mark and Pearson call it the Outlaw. Most brand people say Rebel. Either way, the archetype is the character who breaks the rule because the rule is wrong, or because it's there. Its promise is freedom, and its enemy is whatever counts as normal.

It is the most fun archetype to work with and the most dangerous, for the same reason: the audience believes it completely, right up to the moment they don't.

What the Rebel wants

Out. Out of the rules, the schedule, the expected life. Winning the game is the Hero's ambition. The Rebel wants to leave the table, or flip it. People who respond to the archetype aren't necessarily rebels themselves. Most are living careful lives and buying a small licence to feel otherwise.

Harley-Davidson: the Great American Freedom Machine

Harley put "The Great American Freedom Machine" in its print ads in 1973, and the phrase is still on the T-shirts. It's the purest Rebel line in American branding because it never mentions the motorcycle. The machine is a means. The product is the road, the noise, the leaving.

What Harley understood before most brands is that the Rebel is lonely without a tribe. The Harley Owners Group, founded in 1983, turned the archetype into a membership: rebels, together, on a schedule of rides. Defiance with a calendar. It's the reason the brand survived decades of better-engineered competitors.

Red Bull: Stratos

On 14 October 2012, Felix Baumgartner stepped out of a capsule 38,969 metres above New Mexico and fell. Around eight million people watched the live stream on YouTube, a record at the time. Red Bull paid for all of it, put its name on the capsule, and never once said anything about the drink.

Stratos is the Rebel archetype scaled to a planet: a rule (the edge of space is not a place a person jumps from) broken on purpose, in public, by a brand whose entire identity is the refusal of limits. The product's slogan says it gives you wings. The campaign gave one man wings and let everyone else watch. That's the archetype's trick: you don't have to break the rule yourself, you just have to be on the side of the person who does.

Virgin: don't just play the game

Virgin's stated purpose, in nine words, is "Don't just play the game, change it for good." It's a Rebel line with an ethical clause, which is what lets a single brand stretch from airlines to trains to space travel without confusing anyone. The enemy is the same in every category: the incumbent who has made the experience worse than it needs to be. Virgin walks in, points at them, and grins.

The founder matters here more than for any other brand in this piece. Richard Branson is the archetype in person, which is a gift while he's there and a question for whoever comes next. A Rebel brand built on one man's grin has to find where the defiance lives when he leaves the room.

The one condition

The Rebel fails, and fails loudly, when the company isn't one. A bank that talks like an outlaw and behaves like a bank gets punished in a way an Innocent brand never does, because the Rebel's audience is primed to spot the fake. Defiance is a promise about behaviour: what you'll refuse, who you'll offend, what you'll give up. If the leadership team wouldn't do those things on a bad quarter, the archetype is a costume, and costumes come off.

What this means for a founder-led company

Founder-led companies are often Rebels by birth: the founder saw a category doing something stupid and refused to accept it. The trouble comes later, when the refusal lives only in the founder's head and the company around it has become respectable. The work is to write the rule down, name what the company refuses, and make it something a salesperson can say without the founder present. The archetype is only a strategy once it's a sentence someone else can repeat.