  The combination of flavor symmetries with grand unification is considered:
GUT $ \times$ flavor . To accommodate three generations the flavor group SO(3)
is used. All fermions transform as 3-vectors under this group. The Yukawa
couplings are obtained from vacuum expectation values of flavon fields. For the
flavon fields (singlets with respect to the GUT group) and the Higgs fields
(singlets with respect to the generation group) a simple form for the effective
potentials is postulated. It automatically leads to spontaneous symmetry
breaking for these scalar fields. Discrete S4 transformations relate the
different locations of the minima of the potentials.These potentials can be
used to describe the hierarchy of the well known up quark mass spectrum. Also
the huge hierarchy of the masses of the Higgs fields in grand unified models
can be parametrized in this way. It leads to a prediction of the mass of the
lightest Higgs boson in terms of its vacuum expectation value $v_0$: $
m_{Higgs} = \frac{v_0}{\sqrt{2}} = 123 GeV$.
