House Rules for World Building
In my last post I used the music industry to break down brand world building. Pop stars use narratives and imagery to convey deeper meaning. Using concept albums as a reference point. Read that here.
To be fair, culture is a spark you can’t necessarily account for. It’s a special something that exists and evolves through lived experience. World building helps create the containers to catch it in.
How to catch lightning in a bottle.
A defining element of this model is that it is an ecosystem (full report here).
World building is the act of creating a self-contained universe, necessary here, because ecosystems are rooted in place (blog post).
Culture is dynamic, influenced by external and internal forces and anchored in context. This approach aims to provide a starting point for developing context in the brand sense – roots for immersive storytelling.
My methodology takes from science fiction, screenwriting and developing fashion show notes (like Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton).
Effectively working to place a brand in its most relevant social and cultural setting by building a repository of “house codes” that develop over time and act as reference material.
In this framework, the main role of storytelling is to slow-grow brand heritage by establishing context repeatedly and over time.
From: Pinterest
Creating a brand universe is not purely fiction. In “How Brands Become Icons”, Holt contends that iconic brands compete in myth markets, not product markets (book link). That they are rooted in the cultural values of the time.
A myth market is built from a national ideology, the cultural contradictions that arise and the fantasy world that exists because of this tension. Sounds like subcultures: “groups of people who share norms of behavior, values, beliefs, consumption patterns and lifestyle choices that differ to varying degrees from those of the dominant, mainstream culture” (definition).
Source: Pinterest
I’m calling the output of this step a brand bible. Written at the beginning of the journey just after brand identity is solidified. An anchor meant to be a bridge between strategy and design. This is not a rulebook (Mr Beast Productions 2024). It’s a container with flexible edges for growing this particular type of brand ecosystem.
Designing a brand universe means idealizing the future. “A culturally impactful brand takes a wager on what the future will look like. Ideas, not technology, are what impact the future the most” (Concept Bureau 2022).
Based on the fact that brand building is not one size fits all, the rest is conjecture.
Still, my first pass includes these parts:
Ecosystem. What is the core brand offering and its touch points?
From there I want a mission statement about the core product offering and the guardrails that define its distinctions (Bill Nye example).
Next, what I’m calling onboarding. Were you to hand the keys over, here is everything you need to manage the brand and the foundational knowledge to evolve its strategy over time.
Establish setting. The brand world. The future we’re building for and what we believe.
Establish a history/origin story (Battlestar Galactica example). As we start to define setting and history in more detail, we begin to get a sense of how the brand values come to life. This is where culture begins.
Define larger themes. With the identification of these larger themes we begin to explore contexts through which to make cultural statements. Virgil’s show notes are a good reference point.
Visual codes. Design codes. Storylines.
World building is driven by details. Sometimes strategic ones and sometimes creative. It’s at this point I start working on my own brand bible. It’s one of those things you have to physically touch to understand. Hoping to experiment with Substack as a way to share the details of my own expression as they come to life. That is to say: more to come.
