How speculative sci-fi critiques capitalism and modern branding
Good speculative sci-fi is never really about the future. It’s a critique of the present, and brands can do the same. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl explains how Neuromancer, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Wipeout each used a fictional world to say something about capitalism, rights, and advertising, and why brands should stop chasing trends and instead imagine a better world. He shares how Parliament challenges clients to write bolder vision statements, uses Patagonia as an example of a brand that sells a belief system, and argues that a deep, consistent world is the antidote to marketing’s cynicism. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on sci-fi, What Sci-Fi Can Teach Us About Branding.
Watch the full episode
Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl argues that the best speculative sci-fi, from Ursula K. Le Guin to Margaret Atwood, is always about critiquing the present. Neuromancer is about capitalism, The Handmaid’s Tale is about the fragility of human rights and democracy, and the racing game Wipeout is about corporate advertising and sponsorship.
Brands can critique the present too, but positively, by imagining a better world. That starts with ignoring trends and writing a real vision statement. Parliament pushes clients past generic goals like being the best toward a measurable vision tied to how they change the world.
Patagonia shows where that leads: customers buy the belief that they’re improving the world. Calvin says a believable world needs clear rules about what’s inside and outside of it, followed ruthlessly, and that this kind of deep world is how brands push past the cynicism of the social media age.
Highlights
Speculative sci-fi uses imagined worlds to critique the present.
Brands should stop responding to trends and imagine a better world.
Parliament challenges clients to write measurable, world-changing vision statements.
Patagonia sells a belief system, not just clothing.
Inconsistency, not weirdness, is what breaks a brand world.
Key insights
Trends aren’t the present
Critiquing the present means looking at how the world could be better, not reacting to whatever is popular this month.
Vision statements need ambition and a metric
A measurable goal is fine, but it should be paired with a clear idea of how the brand changes the world, however small.
The best brands create belief systems
Patagonia’s implied question, what if a clothing brand could save the world, shapes its messaging, aesthetics, and aspirations.
Depth makes small moments add up
When marketing feels like a series of blips, a deep, believable world gives each one more meaning.
Detailed analysis
The clip draws a useful line between sci-fi and brand strategy. Sci-fi authors build worlds with rules in order to say something about the real one. Calvin asks brands to do the same, defining their world’s rules and sticking to them so that every message and design choice expresses a belief.
He also names a real obstacle: the cynicism many marketers feel when everything moves fast and nothing seems to matter. His answer isn’t to chase more moments but to build a world deep enough that those moments stack up.
Conclusion
Ask how your brand is changing the world, and what if. For Calvin, that question is where strong, lasting brand work begins.
Transcript
All sci-fi, at least what I think of as good sci-fi—speculative sci-fi, that’s my genre, the Ursula K. Le Guins, the Atwoods—they’re always about critiquing the present. And I think brands can also critique the present, and I think that’s kind of what they should be doing. The thing is, it kind of feels like a little bit of a killjoy take for a brand to do that. But the world can always be better, and every speculative sci-fi story kind of believes that. They usually paint it in a negative sense, so I think a brand can spin it to a positive sense.
But the criticism is that cyberpunk, Neuromancer, it’s not about computers and drugs. It’s about capitalism. Atwood wasn’t really writing about religion in The Handmaid’s Tale. She’s writing about the fragility of human rights and democracy. Wipeout, our favorite racing game, that wasn’t about cars. That was just about corporate advertising and sponsorships, which happened to be in a really, really great game.
And so I guess the way to think about this is that a good way to critique the present is, first of all, stop thinking about trends. Stop responding to trends. Those aren’t the present in the sense that we’re talking about. And start thinking about how your brand can critique the world and imagine a better one. This is a thing that we do all the time at Parliament. We often challenge clients to write a better vision statement for their brand. Most vision statements from brands are utter [bleep]. They’re like, “We want to be the best,” or something like that. And we usually challenge them to be like, no, you exist to do this and change the world this way.
We like to make sure that it’s also a measurable thing, like, I don’t know, we want to make a billion dollars by this day. But it should be by imagining a better world. That measurable thing needs to be in combination with something that actually changes the world. Even the smallest brands, I think, have some effect, change the world at some point.
So once you do that—hey, Patagonia believes, what if a brand could save the world? That starts doing this thing where the best brands create belief systems like that. And so you’re not buying Patagonia. You’re buying the belief that you are changing the world and you’re improving the world when you’re buying Patagonia. That is a sci-fi-ass setup if I’ve ever heard one. It’s certainly a what-if situation.
So, we’ve talked a lot about world building in this. I think that’s kind of what that belief system is. When you start filling out that world, when you start adding all the characters into the McDonald’s world, you get the hamburger. That’s your belief system right there. So, to create that believable world, your brand needs to create the rules that define it. What’s inside of your world? What’s outside of your world? And then just ruthlessly stick to that. That’s that thing I was talking about earlier: inconsistency is the problem, not weirdness, not absurdity.
And those beliefs that you then get into start defining your messaging, your aesthetics, the aspirational qualities of your brand. If you’re Patagonia and you say, what if a clothing brand could save the world, that starts really, really defining everything that you believe and everything that you put out into the world. But you have to stick to it.
So, yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s just a really interesting challenge, because I feel like something happened in branding at some point where we all got a little bit too cynical, and we stopped believing that the things we do could really affect the world. Maybe this is the challenge of marketing and branding in the social media age, where it feels like everything is just a blip. But I think if you take every brand back to that point and say, how are you changing the world? What if this? I think then you can actually do some pretty strong work.
It’s just really hard to get past that cynicism, I know, that we all experience now, of everything moving so fast. Every little marketing moment is a tiny little blip. So I think the more you can create that deep, believable world, the more all of those little blips start stacking up and meaning something more than they are.