How brands build real mythologies: from metal to Rainier
Metal bands are masters of world building, and brands can borrow their playbook. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl explains how setting the boundaries of a world, and sticking to its rules, roots a brand in a real belief system instead of focus-group decisions. He points to a metal band that treats every concert as a communion and never shows its faces, then walks through how Parliament has expanded Rainier Beer’s lore, from a legendary 1976 painting of a barbarian fighting a yeti to the Beerbarian, the Wild Rainiers, and a wizard who reigns over Mount Rainier. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on heavy metal, What Heavy Metal Can Teach You About Branding.
Watch the full episode
Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl explains world building as creating the world you want your brand, company, or metal band to exist within. The first step is setting its boundaries, the way Lord of the Rings establishes magic, elves, and orcs.
Metal bands excel at this. One band he highlights always describes concerts as a communion of followers, creating a dark pagan mindset, and follows a strict rule that whenever a face would be visible in a photo, a left hand covers it. That consistency gives the band an identity rooted in a belief system rather than committee decisions.
Calvin then shows how Parliament applies the idea to Rainier Beer. A hand-painted 1976 image of a barbarian fighting a yeti became the seed for a growing cast: the Beerbarian, the Wild Rainiers that roam Mount Rainier, and Candalf the Gold, with older characters from the brand’s past returning to the mythology.
Highlights
World building starts by setting the boundaries of your world.
Small, consistent rules create powerful lore.
Lore roots a brand in belief rather than focus groups.
Rainier Beer’s 1976 barbarian painting seeded a growing mythology.
Passionate fans latch onto lore through swag and even tattoos.
Key insights
Boundaries make a world believable
Deciding what exists inside your world, and what doesn’t, is the foundation for every story you tell within it.
Consistency turns details into lore
A rule as simple as a hand over the face becomes powerful because the band never breaks it.
Heritage can seed new characters
Rainier’s old painting gave Parliament a starting point for an expanding cast rather than a one-off nostalgia moment.
Lore gives fans something to hold onto
Characters and mythology create the kind of attachment that sells merch and inspires goofy tattoos.
Detailed analysis
The clip connects an unlikely pair, a mysterious metal band and a regional beer, to show that world building is a discipline, not a genre. In both cases, the power comes from rules that are followed every time and a belief system that informs everything the brand puts out.
The Rainier example also shows how a world can grow over years of work. Each new character builds on what came before, and reviving characters from the brand’s past ties the new mythology to its heritage.
Conclusion
World building and lore give a brand a belief system people can step into. As Calvin shows with Rainier Beer, the payoff is a world passionate fans want to keep exploring.
Transcript
And I think one other thing that they start to do, by creating that niche and that audience, is they’re also really good at world building. And I think world building is a term that’s becoming a little more popular as video games and that kind of thing start coming out into the world more often and gain in popularity. World building is just you creating the world that you want your brand, your company, your metal band to exist within.
So the best way to start that, first, is to set the boundaries of it. Is this a magical world? You do this with books all the time, where it’s like, oh, in Lord of the Rings there’s magic. There are elves over here, there are orcs over here, and all of those different things start creating that world. And so metal bands are super good at doing this.
For example, the band [unclear]. This is a photo of them, those guys. A whole part of their thing is that every time they speak on their Instagram, every concert is always spoken of as a communion. It is not a concert. It is a gathering. It is never just a concert. It is followers joining them on this journey together. And that creates this whole really spooky, dark, pagan mindset that I think is really, really strong and works with them. And they have little things like this, like you’re seeing on the screen now, where they just have a rule that you never see their face.
Yes, Twitch. We need more mystery. Yeah, I think we do need more mystery. I agree.
And I love that they have this look where it’s just a rule. This is part of their world building and their lore: in every photo of them, if you could see their face, they put their left hand over it. And so, you know, the left hand, it’s the evil hand. It’s all those things. And it’s just such a good detail. They’re super consistent with it. Everything they post online always comes from that perspective, and I just love all of that so much.
I think the good thing that world building does is that the more and more you focus into creating this world of mystery that you really own, you then start creating your own identity through a belief system. We’re all supposed to say we believe in something as a company, but as we know, some companies struggle with communicating that belief. And by creating this world, it really just steeps everything in it, and it roots it in a deep belief system, not something that’s created by focus groups and committee decisions. And I think that’s the huge power of world building and lore.
And one example of the way we’ve implemented the idea of world building is with Rainier Beer. We’ve done work with them for years. We did their big rebrand years ago. And Rainier Beer had this old painting. Oh, man. Let’s see if I can find it. It’s a painting of a barbarian fighting a yeti, and it immediately created this world of lore for them that I think is just unbelievable. I’ll try and get it on screen here.
Okay, here you go. You can kind of see it. So, this is from—oh, boy, I should know this. Late 70s, early 80s. Totally blanking. Hand-painted in the traditional fantasy style. So, this is a legendary image from Rainier. I want every single Rainier ad to be this.
But over the time we’ve been working with them, we started building this world out. This is called the Beerbarian. Get it? And he’s always fighting the yeti. They also have this whole creature. You can see the bottle with legs here. They call those Wild Rainiers. They roam the mountains and forests of Mount Rainier. Yes, Nick, the Beerbarian. Oh, and Aaron with it: 1976. He knew the exact year. Good job.
And so we started building this whole other world of characters. And my favorite, of course, is who we call Candalf the Gold, which is the wizard that reigns supreme over Mount Rainier. And we just keep building into that world. And I’ll just say you’re going to see the old [unclear] be added into the lore. If you’re a Rainier Beer friend from the 70s or 80s, we’re bringing back some old characters from their past and adding them into the mythology.
So, that’s world building. That’s the lore. All that stuff creates things that passionate fans can really latch on to. And that’s when you start selling swag of these things, when people get goofy-ass tattoos. And I keep trying to push everyone at Parliament to get a Rainier Beer tattoo, but maybe we should do it someday. So, okay.