We live today in a world full of brands. Everyone is looking more and more alike nowadays because we copy successful examples from developed economies in the West.

If we look behind successful brands - principally from the West - it is not difficult to identify the values they represent. They convey to us the authority, styles, fashions and ethos pertaining to their places of origin, of which we have been in danger of slavish imitation, simply because we have accepted that these must be the prevailing norm, the criteria against which we measure ourselves.

Copying the brands from the West simply does not work. We are merely replicating icons and symbols without fully understanding and capturing their underlying spirit and substance. Simply imitating the superficial features of a successful brand renders us hollow at our core, and borrowing from TS Elliott, it is only adopting the shape without its form, shade without its colors, and gestures without motion.

The Hippie movement of the 60s and 70s is a good case in point. It failed to catch on in this part of the world because it did not identify well the way our children are raised, our background, history, legacy and traditions.

Copying from our neighbors in the East is another story. As we share our common family values, social norms, cultural aspirations and understanding, replicating from, say, Japanese music and Korean TV series are frequent occurrences. We can all say that what is pleasing to Japanese ears often pleases the ears of people in this part of the world, and Korean TV story lines appeal to the tastes of the Asian TV watchers at large.

We need to develop a branding specific to Hong Kong, something of which we are proud and something that is deeply and intricately bound up in our collective identity and something we ourselves can contribute. Something, in other words, that stems from within our own respective cultures and common legacies.

Fortunately, many of us have begun to realize that creative industries should be seen in the larger context of the revival of indigenous cultures to go along with global entrepreneurship. For many decades we in Hong Kong have spent time learning, imitating and assimilating ideas from the modernized West. Now it's time that we look inward, to consolidate our own cultural vision and to contribute something of that to the world. The blooming creative industries, the film industry for instance, are in part the expression of this trend.

Such soul-searching endeavors into our cultural commonality speak more powerfully than towering icons and expensive advertising campaigns in identifying a country or a city, because they come from the roots of the community and carry its history.

However, comparing tangible cultural centers and opera houses, these works of less overtly material influence cannot be achieved by government budgets alone. They have to be brought forth by collective self-awareness and the revival of collective cultural identity. The state, the civil society, individual artists and writers all have a role to play.

The author is former secretary for home affairs of the Hong Kong SAR government

(HK Edition 04/14/2010 page1)