This paper explores how urban actors leverage iconic branding as a cultural catalyst to fill the void left by the declining narrative of the nation. The global, deindustrialised service economy raises the cultural politics of the landscape, including heritage governance issues relative to spatial theory. The case analysis unpacks the convergence-divergence dilemma, particularly, how the Guggenheim master-brand transfer simultaneously changed the political dynamics and corroded Bilbao’s sense of place. It contributes to our understanding how a cultural hybridisation approach can help to reinterpret the ‘integration- diversity’ dichotomy embedded in iconic branding, particularly its impacts on urban socio-cultural, economic and political institutions.