Myth making and wonder - the new brand experience

I often think and write about the importance of “world building” in today’s mixed-media reality: Brands have more control than ever over where and how consumers experience their point of view, from digital feeds and properties to packaging design and retail merchandising. And with that comes many new opportunities to build emotional texture.

Most have relied on platforms and algorithms rather than tapping into exciting cultural myth markets. In many ways, brands have lost the magic of being brands: the advantage they generate when they create outsized meaning for people.

Something sinister happened over the past algorithmically driven decade: brands took a sharp turn toward efficiency and benefits mindshare, often focusing on a laundry list of functional and emotional whoop-de-doos.

It’s this paint-inside-the-lines mentality that stokes irrelevancy and meaninglessness. And the whole point of a brand is to create an ... See more

In 2024, it’s easy to forget that iconic brands—those that win by riding cultural waves and becoming deeply associated with new cultural aspirations—must look to cultural idea markets first. A cultural idea market comes from the collective consciousness; it’s an aspiration or belief that a culture can unite around and become excited about.

The best... See more

The creation of a new reality is centered on three tenets: narrative, curation, and repetition.

A story is how we navigate the ambiguity of our environment, how we make sense of the world. It’s the promised land, a vision worth aspiring to, or a reading of the world worth attaching to. A story either inspires us to make a future destination our hom... See more

Brands, at their best, can be deeply aspirational drivers of humanity. They are optimistic creative objects, which make them among the best vehicles for human self-determination that we have, especially as other vehicles for meaning-making and impact decline in importance

Akin to the practice of world-building in science fiction literature, brands embracing the concept of Brand Universes adhere to the principle that the process of building a Brand Universe is an ongoing, perpetual endeavour devoid of a predefined completion point . In other words, cultivating a Brand Universe is like setting off a chain reaction, fo... See more