Imagine the world your company could create
Branding usually explains who a company is. Calvin Ross Carl argues sci-fi asks something bigger: if your company changed the world, what would that world look like?
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl offers a final thought on what sci-fi teaches brands. Most companies use branding to explain who they are, which is branding at its core: the way a company expresses itself. But a sci-fi story pushes further. It begs a brand to ask: if my company changed the world, what would that world look like?
Highlights
- Most companies use branding to explain who they are.
- Sci-fi pushes brands to imagine the world they’d create.
- The question: if my company changed the world, what would it look like?
Key insights
Expression is the baseline
Explaining who you are is the starting point of branding, not the finish line.
Picture the changed world
Imagining the world your company would create gives a brand a vision with real stakes, and a clearer line to its deepest truth.
Detailed analysis
The question shifts a brand from describing itself to describing its impact. Calvin sees it as a way to cut through hedging and get to what a company really believes. It’s the sci-fi move applied to strategy: propose a world, then work out what it takes to build it.
Conclusion
Don’t just say who you are. Imagine the world you’d leave behind.
So I guess this is probably just some final thoughts on the sci-fi talk. Most companies use branding to explain who they are, and that’s kind of just branding at its core. It’s the way a company expresses itself. But I think the one thing we can learn from a sci-fi story is that it begs your brand to ask the question: if my company changed the world, what would that world look like?