and Pepsi thinks it’s great for young people. How nice. The soft drink giants have finally stopped talking about themselves and have started to talk to their audiences. “Open Happiness,” and “Refresh Everything”

Even brands with huge cultural cachet have come to flee the sin of vanity. Remember Coke’s old tagline: “Coke is it!”? Or Pepsi’s: “The Choice of a New Generation”? These self-admiring statements are both meaningless and transparent attempts to sell you something. They start the conversation and immediately end it. What’s the expected response

orienting it to stories that have always worked in the oral tradition—those that call people to higher purpose.

The traditional ways no longer work; suddenly, it’s evolve or die. The good news is that our audiences may need us as much as we need them. People everywhere are looking for ways to make sense of a rapidly changing world in which traditional stories no longer hold resonance.

More than half of the hundred largest economies in the world are not countries but corporations. Marketing is the language through which they speak to the customers that sustain them. In the United States, marketers are becoming some of the defining players in our democracy. In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the unlimited

While it was once assumed that the fate of our world would be written in holy texts or constitutions, it now appears that it will be written, at least in part, in marketing campaigns.

The battlefield of the story wars has moved to the marketplace.

unfolding drama much larger than ourselves.

convenience. The stories they both tell open the door for all of us to be something more than a consumer. They invite us to be participants in a grand,