What is World Building For?
Defining world building through the lens of an album rollout. Quick and dirty.
Use world building as a step in the process of developing culture for your brand community. The act of creating a self-contained universe (The Ideaspace 2023).
In storytelling, it is a part of the writing process that sets up where the story takes place, in setting and in context. The context piece is what I’m struggling with most, because the need for context changes based on the kind of story. How then, should I define its strategic approach?
I thought it would be fun to root this in the perspective of music albums and rollouts because the jump from fiction storytelling to brand storytelling isn’t exactly 1:1. A fiction story is self-contained, maybe in a book or a movie, and presented in final form. A brand exists in;’’4 an ecosystem of touch points, orbiting around a central product offering. The meaning evolves over time.
The closest cultural connection is the business of music. Let’s use the album.
An artist could express themselves as from a unique world without explicitly defining it for the audience. Then, the album rollout forms an ecosystem around the project that adds more richness. In both cases, world building is about the strategic choices we make to define the experience.
The choices in music are things like imagery, symbolism, metaphors, narrative, sonic styles which build into a body of work in each project over time (Reddit).
A brand world at retail is built with product names, hero styles, seasonal campaigns, evergreen campaigns, in-store experience, e-commerce experience, customer loyalists on social media and direct comms.
My final connection is this - over the course of world building research I came across “narrative design”. Narrative design integrates storytelling elements into interactive experiences like video games, apps or immersive media. World building is the step in the process of telling a good story that builds over time.
We need more stories.
