What sci-fi can teach us about branding

Transcript

Intro and studio news

What’s going on, everybody? Welcome to You’re Not the Audience. This is a weekly live show where I break down brands, products, and subcultures that stand out by not appealing to everyone. I’m Calvin, creative director at Parliament. Parliament is a brand transformation agency that helps brands when they’re facing big changes, and we help them get to the next stage of themselves through strategy, positioning, identity, all that good stuff.

It is super exciting to be back. We didn’t do a stream last week because we had our big annual golf tournament, so I’m trying to only sneak in so many fun side things every week. Structure for the episode today is our normal thing. We’re going to start with some recent news and obsessions, and then we’ll do some deep dives into some sci-fi books and movies and what they can teach us about branding. I think this is going to be a really fun, nerdy day today.

So how’s everybody in chat doing? Did everybody do their homework assignment of bringing some kind of sci-fi movie or sci-fi book to talk about? I think we’ll be able to get into a lot of them today. I feel like I’ve been spotty the last couple weeks with holidays and whatnot. Parliament’s been doing good. We’re staying busy—maybe a little too busy. Summertime is getting hectic, which is great. Love it. I feel lucky and privileged to have a busy agency right now in this world.

The Caddyshack Invitational

So let’s start with some fun news stuff. I guess this isn’t even news—this is just our recent obsession at Parliament. I’ve definitely talked about it on stream a lot because I’ve been excited about the stuff we were doing for it. Last week we did our annual golf tournament called the Caddyshack Invitational. I’ve actually got some stuff to share with you all.

We are definitely not golfers, so it’s always a very fun event. It takes all day. There’s like 20 of us, different people from Parliament and friends. We all go out, take over a golf course, and golf all day. We’re terrible golfers, but we always have lots of fun. It’s a good excuse to day drink and just hang out with friends. But we always design fun stuff for it. This year we had the illustrator Brett Parson reimagine our mascot, who we named Bugs Bogey, and so we had to make some swag with it.

This is just a Figma board I’m showing right now of what’ll probably end up being some social stuff that we put together for it. Of course, we had to do koozies. Some shirt designs: “Help. I shanked my balls at the Caddyshack Invitational.” Very classy. You’d see good old Bugs Bogey here, and some photos of the crew. Oh, Sarah already brought up Dune. Oh yeah, we’re going to talk about Dune today. There will definitely be Dune chat.

All this stuff turned out really fun. I think we’re going to put up at least some posts on Instagram about it, but the shirts turned out great—Bugs Bogey slamming his golf club. None of us got too sunburnt. It’s been hot and spicy in Portland. We need to do a big run of all these stickers for everyone. Friend of Parliament Kyle, he was a pro golfer. We’ve done these golf tournaments many years, and this is the first year I haven’t come in last place with our team. So I mean, that’s something, right? We’ll probably do another one next year and probably make even more swag for it. T-shirts and koozies are always the fun stuff to make.

Yes, Jared said, “Be the ball.” You’ve got to be the ball. Everybody asks why we chose a rabbit for the mascot of the Caddyshack Invitational. There’s not really a good answer. The true answer is that we are huge fans of CSA Images, the legendary vintage ad stock image website—Charles Anderson there, if I remember right, makes so much amazing stuff. They had this old illustration of a rabbit golfing, and we were like, “That’s it.” That’s just how it accidentally became a rabbit. So we’re continuing the tradition with Brett Parson, who is an illustrator of Tank Girl and all that stuff. He did the new version of it, and we love it. Bugs Bogey forever. Maybe we should do Bugs Bogey tattoos this year.

Yeah, Aaron’s in the chat. He said, “Many bogeys.” We did have many bogeys. Aaron Noah, CEO of Parliament, came in last place with his team. Sorry to call you out, Aaron, but when our CEO gets last place in a golf tournament, you know we are truly not a corporation of golfers.

Why sci-fi and branding belong together

Okay, should we get into it? Let’s talk about some sci-fi stuff. I think that’s it from Parliament. Aaron, is there other Parliament news I’m supposed to be sharing? I can’t remember. It’s been hectic.

We’ve talked a lot about the worlds of sci-fi already on this live show. We’ve talked about Wipeout, the legendary video game, with all of the design by The Designers Republic. That’s a racing game, but it’s not really about racing. It’s about corporate sponsorship and the proliferation of that. I think that’s kind of where this initial idea sprang from.

So let’s start talking about what sci-fi can teach us about branding. I think the reason I really love sci-fi in this relationship is that sci-fi and the best brands don’t really accept the world as it currently is. They all propose a world that could exist. Sci-fi stories are really just about building completely fictional settings. We’ve talked a lot about world building on this live show, and that’s exactly what that is: building your fictional setting for your brand.

But what sci-fi stories do really well, that I think all brands could learn from, starts with this: if this idea is true, or if this fact becomes true, what would happen? What else would become true? It’s a really simple idea. You take this one little nugget of change or truth, whatever it is. What happens when you extrapolate it into infinity, and how does that affect your brand, your world?

Every new world starts with one small change

You see this in sci-fi stuff all the time. Let’s pull some stuff up. Sorry, you’re just getting wiki pages today. Not thrilling. And apparently they don’t have very exciting cover images here.

You get stories like The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of my all-time favorite writers. It’s almost this space epic, but it’s really just about what if there wasn’t fixed gender, what kind of worlds would be created, and what happens when outsiders come into that world. You’ve got stuff like Hyperion, an absolutely legendary sci-fi book. It just asks this simple thing: what if humanity can only be saved by AI, or maybe killed by it? That’s kind of the setup—maybe relevant to our current world.

You’ve got stuff like The Handmaid’s Tale. We all know the show—everyone’s seen the show, right? But the book is incredible. It’s asking what happens if fertility problems affect our world. Specifically, it’s what happens if fertility problems led to a religious fascist state. We all know Children of Men too. Great movie. It asks the same kind of question: what happens if children just stop being born? Sci-fi and post-apocalypse scenarios like that share a lot of similarities. They ask a lot of similar questions.

The challenge with connecting sci-fi to branding is that these are all pretty dark subjects. Sci-fi tends to be a critique of our current state of things. I’ll probably talk more about that later. But these all really do show how one little small change in our world can extrapolate into creating a completely new world. That’s the idea that I think really starts translating over to brands, and it’s helpful for us to think about how we can create new worlds: every new world starts with one tiny little change.

For brands, I always think of that one small change as maybe your brand’s one key differentiator blown out to its most extreme, inevitable end. I think it’s helpful to do that in general with whatever your key differentiator is, because maybe it’s a good thing at the end, maybe it’s a bad thing. It’s a really great trick for imagining that very specific future you imagine for your story, for your brand, for whatever it may be.

Another nice branding trick that comes out of this is, instead of asking “what do we sell?” you could ask, “What future do we believe is coming?” Selling is important. That’s why we’re actually in this business; we want to sell things. But when you start extrapolating out to that future, you can find how you connect to it.

Asking what if

All of these little small changes I’m talking about always start with the idea of “what if.” Anyone in chat, think about this with your favorite sci-fi things and your favorite brands, the ones that are really strong. They usually ask this question of “what if blank?” And sometimes asking absurd questions like that—where you’re the annoying child that just keeps asking “what if?”—is a great way to find super exciting brand stories and big ideas for ad campaigns. It’s a great engine for imagination. So ask “what if” about everything relating to your brand. That opens up a lot of stuff.

Right now we’re working with a client named Netlify. They’re really great, cool, smart people. They handle a lot of stuff for the web, but essentially they’re a web platform where you can use AI or code to create anything for the web, and essentially anyone could create it. So you start asking, what if every person on Earth could create for the web? That starts imagining a world that’s really, really different from the one we currently have. In that example, some of those coding companies might be asking, what if coding by hand no longer existed? For outdoor companies: what if the outdoors became uninhabitable? That’s almost the Patagonia story. For beer brands, I don’t know, something absurd: what if water no longer existed? [laughter] What kind of ad campaigns would come out of that? So always start asking yourself “what if” questions to push toward some absurd, yet obviously really truthful, take on your brand.

And if I start dripping sweat during this talk, that’s because it’s hot and muggy in Portland and gross. I have a tiny little fan going down here that’s doing the Lord’s work trying to keep me cool. So if I’m just dying at the end of this and look like I’m in a sauna, sorry, everyone.

I think this is a really key and fun exploration. It’s a different way to look at brands. We often try to ask, “What are we selling? What’s the main selling point of this product?” That’s great. But if you start imagining new futures based on this one small change your brand is adding to the world, I think you get some incredible ideas.

All these things ask “what if.” I talked about how The Left Hand of Darkness asks what if gender wasn’t fixed. Margaret Atwood, who wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, also wrote a book series that starts with Oryx and Crake, which just asks what if biotech companies were able to start engineering life, and it explodes. They take over governments, all kinds of things. Sarah mentioned Dune. Dune is about a lot of things, but Dune is just, what if we fought about oil in space? That is really all Dune is about. The whole setup is that spice is oil that’s also a psychedelic. That’s what Dune is, and everything blows up from that one question.

Severance, the TV show, asks what if we could truly separate work from life. Severance is a great sci-fi setup—just so sharp and simple. What else? Gattaca. I know Sarah here is a big Gattaca fan. Gattaca just asks, what if DNA could predict crime? And you start extrapolating all of that out, and it’s great.

Brands that ask what if

But then how do brands take that? The one that we all really know—they’ve maybe stepped away from it a little bit lately, but I think it’s still great—is Nike. Nike just asked, “What if every person is an athlete?” Believing that everyone is a fucking champ and an athlete who can overcome anything is such a powerful idea for a brand. I think it’s great. Liquid Death, we’ve talked about a lot on here. They ask, what if water looked like a metal band? I love it so much.

Oh, I realize I’ve just had The Handmaid’s Tale up this whole time. I’m too excited talking about all these things. Another one I’ve been obsessed with—this is my obsession, I know I’ve brought it up here—let me throw up Hyperblast, the new caffeine-infused beverage. Here we go. This is the stuff. I have become obsessed with this brand Hyperblast, which is a new beverage created by the agency Tavern that’s basically like Four Loko. And their challenge is just, what if jet skis were the coolest thing on Earth? Not saying that they’re not. That’s literally what they’ve talked about in all of their branding for it: what if there was nothing cooler on Earth than a jet ski, and jet skis kind of ruled the world? They just doubled down on it. At their event activations, they’ve got guys in full racing gear, like jet ski racers, and they created this whole other world around it. Incredible.

There are a lot of other brands that do this. We could list them off forever. Oh yeah, Jared said, “Vintage VHS packaging.” Yeah, they really nailed that with the Hyperblast look. Somehow they made the ’80s and early ’90s look way better than it ever was. So pretty.

Other brands do some kind of absurd things that I love. Warby Parker asked, “What if you could try glasses on online?” That was the thing that made them different from everyone. It seems absurd. Lego even was like, “What if you build the toy?” That’s actually an insane idea when you think about it. The pitch for that is, “Oh, it’s the kids’ job to build the toys. We just give them the pieces.” Oh yeah, Ryan, Fuel in the Tank: “Super fun branding.” Yeah, the Hyperblast stuff. Dang, it’s so great.

Anyway, the thing that works really great about all those different examples is that they ask these “what if” questions that start undermining the things you think are standard within their category. Water always has to look clean and pure, and Liquid Death was like, “Fuck you. No, it doesn’t. It can look like a heavy metal band, and it can be gnarly.” Those “what if” questions start leading you to undercut everything we think we understand about a category and actually upend it. Honestly, that’s probably the biggest insight, if you want to call it that, from this whole thing. Maybe we’ll talk about that at the end.

Believability, not realism

The other thing that “what if” question does is help construct a world that isn’t realistic. And that’s what great brand worlds really do. They construct a world that’s not realistic, but by doing that, it gets to some kind of deeper truth. So realism isn’t the goal when you’re asking these questions, but believability is. That’s the basis of all world building in brands, which we’ve definitely talked a lot about in here. All world building is just creating enough rules that the whole premise of your absurd new world is completely believable. The more you follow that unique premise for your brand, the more believable your world becomes.

There’s always the joke about Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field when he would give presentations. His trick was just that if he spoke consistently about something being magical, we all started to believe it. He would say “magic,” “magical,” all of those words, enough that we started believing he was some magician of technology, when really he was just a very smart [bleep].

The reason you can go really deep on that absurdity is that people forgive weirdness. Weirdness is okay, but they don’t forgive inconsistency. If in one thing you’re trying to say it’s magical, but then it’s, “No, don’t worry, it’s totally practical,” that inconsistency always creates a problem.

So the reason I like thinking about constructing a world for believability—not necessarily realism, not to reflect the real world as we all understand it—is that when we’re imagining a future, specificity is kind of the most important part. When you imagine companies in a sci-fi setting, we oddly know those companies as characters. There’s Weyland-Yutani from Alien, this evil corporation that wants all the alien secrets.

Neuromancer and getting insanely specific

Or think of Neuromancer. Neuromancer basically created the idea of cyberpunk. Oh my god, what’s his name—Gibson, who wrote Neuromancer. While I’m talking about it, I’m going to pull up some covers. The Neuromancer covers are some of my favorite covers for any book on Earth. Let’s just do a quick little aside. So this is Neuromancer. Even the classic cover is pretty good for its era.

Neuromancer came out in 1984 and set up the whole idea of cyberpunk. Blade Runner came out of this, everything we think of where corporations have overtaken Neo-Tokyo, all of those kinds of ideas, where we’re all going to have implants. Neuromancer asks, what if data and information became actual geography and actual worlds?

But let’s look at the Neuromancer covers. They have a ton of awesome ones that you’ve probably seen before. This one I love. So good. It feels very not standard sci-fi cover. Love this. And this one—I’m totally blanking on the artist who did this, but this cover is so cool. I follow this illustrator on Instagram. Awesome style. I think this was originally the Brazil release of the book, if I remember right.

Anyway, William Gibson, who wrote Neuromancer—I feel like this guy understood branding better than most brand strategists. He infused that whole world with such heavy branding and corporate speak. That’s why everything in cyberpunk sounds like you’re reading gibberish: it’s so heavily branded.

Oh, Ryan, Fuel in the Tank, said: “Raised by Wolves. Also sort of relevant for brands. What if AI becomes a new religion? How do you align yourself, and what happens next?” Yes, absolutely. Raised by Wolves is a great show. If nobody saw it, go watch it. It’s kind of set in the Alien universe. Was it based on a book? Ryan, let me know. I can’t remember the story of Raised by Wolves. Oh yeah, Jared says, “Sucks it was canceled.” Yeah, it definitely ended a little bit rough, I remember. But that was great. You go to a new planet, and what happens when these AI robots start creating their own culture on a planet?

Okay, anyway, back to what I was talking about. I got too distracted by Neuromancer. It’s incredible. But Neuromancer is a great example of getting so insanely specific that the whole world becomes believable no matter how absurd it is. Neuromancer and cyberpunk worlds are absolutely infused with technology. People are receiving implants. Everything’s fueled by drugs. Insane worlds, but they get so specific that I think we can all, as branders, learn something from it. Okay, Ryan says, “I don’t think it was a book.” Okay. It should be, though. Somebody has probably written a bad TV-show-to-book thing.

Critiquing the present

Raised by Wolves is a great example. What if AI becomes a new religion? That’s kind of what they’re challenging there. 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—is always about critiquing the present. And I think brands can also critique the present. I think that’s kind of what they should be doing.

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. The criticism in cyberpunk, in Neuromancer, isn’t about computers and drugs. It’s about capitalism. Atwood wasn’t really writing about religion in The Handmaid’s Tale. She was writing about the fragility of human rights and democracy. Wipeout, our favorite racing game, wasn’t about cars. That was just about corporate advertising and sponsorships, which happened to be in a really, really great game.

So I guess a good way to think about critiquing 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. Start thinking about how your brand can critique the world and imagine a better one.

This is a thing 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: “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 on changing the world at some point.

Patagonia believes, what if a brand could save the world? The best brands create belief systems like that. You’re not buying Patagonia, you’re buying the belief that you’re changing the world and improving the world when you buy Patagonia. That is a sci-fi-ass setup if I’ve ever heard one. It’s certainly a “what if” situation.

We’ve talked a lot about world building in this show, and I think that’s 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 Hamburglar. 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 ruthlessly stick to that. That’s the thing I was talking about earlier: inconsistency is the problem, not weirdness, not absurdity.

Those beliefs 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 defining everything that you believe and everything that you put out into the world. But you have to stick to it.

I think it’s 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 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 if you take every brand back to that point and ask, “How are you changing the world? What if this?” then I think you can actually do some pretty strong work. It’s just really hard to get past that cynicism that I know we all experience now, of everything moving so fast, where every little marketing moment is a tiny little blip. 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.

Favorite sci-fi books, movies, and covers

Before I continue rattling on about these things, what other sci-fi stuff has everyone been paying attention to lately? Let’s talk favorite sci-fi books and movies. I think the best sci-fi things ever are basically every book cover of a ’70s and ’80s sci-fi book. That’s already the best sci-fi. Just go to your local used bookshop and find the section with all your old used ’70s and ’80s books. That’s all the sci-fi inspiration you ever need in life.

Oh, Jared: the Omni magazine covers. Let’s see those. I’m going to pull those up. Dang. Yeah, those are incredible, if anyone hasn’t seen these. Omni was a sci-fi magazine from—oh God, help me out—probably the late ’70s to the late ’80s, something like that. I don’t remember. But they had so many beautiful, surrealist sci-fi covers. This stuff is so good. And just the fact that all of these things were created when nobody was—yeah, this is November 1979. Nobody was making this in Photoshop. There wasn’t an AI making this. It was all probably some nerdy illustrator with an airbrush.

This is definitely also the old paste-up person in me. I did paste-up in my youth. For anybody here who doesn’t know paste-up, that’s the old-school way of laying things out, even in the digital age, where you’d print things out, put wax on the back of the layout, cut it out, lay it out on a larger sheet of paper, then photograph it with a giant camera, and that’s the film negative you send to print. Doing paste-up on these things is crazy. It’s little stuff that now is so easy, but you see this cutout in the Omni logo up here. All these things had to be cut out by hand and photographed. Incredible. Dang, Jared, good call on Omni. I think I saw a few copies of this in a vintage store I went to recently.

Yeah, you win. This is great. My favorite sci-fi movie is good old Alien, the very first Alien. It’s sci-fi horror. I’m not as big of a fan of Aliens—I know that’s a hot take. I don’t really care for Aliens. But just the look of the original Alien poster is great, and the way it comes on screen.

Oh, “Fave premise: Firefly.” I actually don’t know Firefly very well. I feel like that’s probably a major miss. I definitely have seen it, but I honestly don’t remember a lot about it. So maybe I’ll have to get re-educated on Firefly.

Yeah, Alien is great. For anybody who’s watched the Alien movies, they always do the title screen where the letters just build in slowly. They’re just blocks, and it builds in slowly over a dramatic shot. I think it’s so good. I can’t believe how good the first movie in this series was, and then how bad every movie is after it. Sorry, everyone. They’re fine. They’re great movies. They’re fun. But just by comparison, dang. Such a good little premise in that one, too.

Yeah, Firefly is basically a space western. I think that’s why I initially liked it. I don’t know why I didn’t follow up. I love westerns. I’ve got a soft spot for cowboy stuff. Oh, Jared says, “Breakdown of the design of Alien.” Yeah, it’s great.

My other sci-fi obsession has been the video game Marathon. I’m not going to annoy everybody about Marathon again. Nobody’s playing the game, but I am. I think it’s great. Go play Marathon. Incredible game, with some of the coolest-looking, most stylish sci-fi aesthetic you’ve ever seen. Maybe this is part of the challenge of Marathon, and why it isn’t a huge massive success: I don’t know if I could actually say what its “what if” statement is.

Okay, here’s the world of Marathon. I’m going to nerd out with everyone. A colony of people was set up on another planet. They all go missing, but then for some reason you start sending people—these robots that are imbued with the spirits and souls of people—down to the planet to check on what’s going on. I guess it’s a corporate cover-up story in the end. Like all sci-fi things, there’s always some corporate overlord doing something bad. But that’s great.

All right, note to self: watch some Firefly. That’s going to be my homework from this. So, Jared, check in on me later and remind me to watch some Firefly. Oh, just one second. I have to close my office door. My dog escaped. Okay. My dog was hanging out in here. I don’t know why. Maybe she likes it because I’m in the hot, stuffy part of the house.

Small stories, big worlds

Yeah, Ryan, Fuel in the Tank, says, “Alex Garland sci-fi niche with Devs and Ex Machina.” Movie-wise, that gets into some of my favorite sci-fi, when it feels small. One of my favorite examples—it’s a good movie—is Signs, where it feels like you’re almost witnessing a one-room play while this sci-fi thing is happening around it. You’re stuck mostly viewing the world from one viewpoint, from within the house. You don’t get that big, broad, epic view of everything.

Ex Machina does that in a great way. This crazy story is happening, and there’s obviously a whole world happening outside of it—that world building and believability aspect—but you’re mostly witnessing it from this one little viewpoint. I think that’s always so good, and that’s really what Alien did. Alien was actually a pretty small little movie, and somehow, when you add in things like the aliens and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, it builds this idea that the world is much huger beyond whatever is happening in this tiny, small story.

That’s absolutely what brands can do. Focus on your one little thing. Put tendrils in your story that lead out to other things. Focus on that truth, whatever that weirdness is, and go with that. Yeah, “Makes it feel relatable when it’s more intimate.” Absolutely.

If your company changed the world

Okay, 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?

This is actually enough of a thing I’ve been thinking about lately that I want to start integrating a question like this into some brand strategy work more specifically. Because if you ask, “If my company changed the world, what would the world look like?” you immediately start cutting out a lot of the [bleep] that comes up: “Well, maybe we have to say this. Maybe we have to say that. We’ve got to appease this.” I think you’ll get a much clearer line toward what that really, really deep truth of the brand is.

And there’s one way of looking at your brand to make sure you’re differentiating yourself in an interesting way. Maybe this is a question that comes before that one, but this is a challenge to every brand. How do I phrase this? What if the most basic assumption of your brand’s category is wrong? That’s what we’ve talked about with Liquid Death. The most basic assumption of that brand category, water, is that it should be pure, refreshing, clean, light, airy. And Liquid Death was like, “No, it is a dirty, gross, heavy metal brand where you go to the extreme by drinking this water.” That’s an absurd premise, and it works. When you start challenging whatever that most basic assumption beneath everything is, that’s when you start getting to interesting areas.

We talked about Nike. It probably doesn’t seem like a revolutionary idea anymore, but the fact that Nike’s vision of the world was that anyone can be an athlete inherently goes in the opposite direction of all other fitness and athletics-based brands. There’s always an inherent elitism to most fitness stuff. Maybe elitism isn’t the right term, but there’s inherently gatekeeping, because in order to do this fitness stuff, you have to be fit. You have to be overcoming. You have to be doing this. So when you twist it to be, “Nope, everyone can do this,” it’s actually a pretty big change in the way they view the world.

So undermine that most basic assumption of your category. Try to change one thing that everyone else thinks is permanent, and the rest of the world will probably follow you. I think that’s at the core of what we can learn from sci-fi: it is always challenging one standard, understood, traditional viewpoint about something. You turn that tradition on its head, and you can start building a whole world from that.

The only thing is, when you’re imagining that world, when you do that little twist of the standard, you really have to double down on it. You have to build that whole world and all its consistency from that. Because if you’re inconsistent, everyone will be like, “Oh, this is [bleep]. They don’t really believe this.” So you have to paint that picture for all of your customers and all of your fans. I think that starts getting into peak aspirational brand territory.

Star Wars, fandom, and politics

I think that probably covers enough of my stuff. I’m going to look back through my notes. Is there anything I’m missing? Now I just want to talk about more sci-fi stuff. All right, this is always the shameful, embarrassing part for myself when it comes to sci-fi stuff. How do folks in the chat feel about Star Wars? Because I’ve always been a little bit indifferent to Star Wars, and I feel like that makes me a bad sci-fi fan. But maybe it’s just because I’ve witnessed what they’ve done to Star Wars.

Oh yeah, Ryan, Fuel in the Tank, says, “My first sci-fi love, but getting bored of it.” Oh, Aaron says, “How is Luke Skywalker the protagonist?” [laughter] Yeah, Luke Skywalker is a very funny protagonist. He’s not really the most thrilling, but I guess maybe that’s what makes him good. He’s learning, and you’re learning along with him.

This is probably another big, deeper conversation, but there’s definitely been some kind of death of cultural criticism or something. There have been the jokes about very far-right, fascist-friendly political thinkers who love Rage Against the Machine or something like that. There’s a whole slew of people who don’t realize that Star Wars is a deeply anti-fascist story. Somewhere along the way that kind of got lost.

It’s the same with Warhammer. I love Warhammer games. And the main characters in it are terrible. The Space Marines are a complete fascist, dictatorial, intergalactic [laughter] government that’s taking over and killing everybody on every planet. But there are a lot of guys in that space, specifically guys, who think they’re the good guys, and you’re like, “No, this is satire.” So maybe that’s what’s happened with my love of things like Star Wars. It got ruined by some of the fandom or something.

Yeah, someone says, “Great, but too many spin-offs, and starting to fall flat.” They’re hit or miss. I haven’t watched most of the recent Star Wars stuff, so I’m behind. More nerd talk: there is a really good trading card game, in the vein of Magic: The Gathering, called Star Wars: Unlimited, which I think is an incredible game. It has great, very unique artwork. I think it’s actually worth looking at just for that. Let me see if I can find some stuff. They did a much more graphic illustration style that I think was really neat. For me, that was the big standout.

Let’s see if I can find some good imagery of cards here. You can kind of see in here they did this really cool, a little bit more comic book style, but super graphic. Definitely more unique in the space. A lot of people either loved it or hated it, but I think the card game is great. I think it’s one of the best card games ever made, but I just can’t get into the Star Wars theme enough to care. I actually just sold all my cards off for it.

But this is branding talk here: the idea of putting out a trading card game is just insane. It’s so expensive. You have to sell millions and millions of copies in order to make any money. And all you have to do to differentiate yourself in the end is, obviously, the gameplay mechanisms, but also the look of the cards. That’s truly it—that, and how people relate to the stories those cards tell. The problem with Star Wars is that, for most people, that story only goes so deep.

Okay, you guys are all talking about Andor. That’s the thing I need to watch. Sorry, I’m going to put Firefly to the side and finally watch Andor, because everyone keeps saying Andor is this great rebel story. So okay, I’ve got to watch it. Dang, that’s what’s coming up next, then. It sounds like Andor is pretty revolution-minded, which maybe we could use a little bit more of in our lives these days.

I do think one thing sci-fi does that more brands could do is accept that the world is inherently political. Sci-fi is always cultural critique, and it always inherently challenges the present and how we do things. Yeah, Ryan says it feels like an extremely relevant show to be watching right now. And I think brands could stand to actually accept that branding and advertising are inherently a part of our political landscape, the same way anything is.

I think it was Jared who turned me on to this: Ian Anderson from The Designers Republic just gave a talk. It was a Zoom meeting thing, and I’m bummed because I missed it, but I’ve seen some clips come out of it where they asked him if design is a political practice. It was really fun to hear him talk about it, because he comes up from a very working-class British background, so he has this mindset that if you weren’t worried about politics, it just means you’re a little too posh. Because the politics are happening to you whether you like it or not.

That’s kind of the way he approached all design and branding: it should all be propaganda for something. That’s what it is. You’re inherently putting something out with a political statement. It’s the classic question of whether art can be political or not political. But maybe that’s a conversation for another time, the politics of art and design. I might not be smart enough for that one. We’ll see.

Final thoughts

All right, I think that’s time to wrap it up for the day. It’s almost 1:00 my time. So, just as a reminder: when you’re starting to work with a brand, whether it’s a new brand or a rebrand, start asking that “what if” question.

Oh yeah, Jared says, “Sagmeister next month, so sign up.” Yeah, Sagmeister is doing that chat. I absolutely can’t remember the guy’s name who’s putting it on—if you can drop a link in chat or something for that. A legendary advertising guy who’s doing the interviews. I’m totally blanking on it.

But yeah, remember to ask yourself, when you’re working on brand stuff, that “what if” question, and think about how you can undermine and undercut that really basic assumption of your whole category. I think those are two fun challenges. Next time you’re working with a brand, do that. What if? And what’s the most basic assumption of that category, and how do you undercut it?

I’ll be back next week again. It’s been a bummer that I had to skip the last couple weeks because we had holiday stuff and other events going on. I don’t exactly know what we’re going to talk about yet, but it’ll probably be something fun and nerdy. That seems to be the way it’s going with me.

I’m trying to think if there’s anything else. This is always a reminder about the good old Parliament website. I’m reminded because a new big email blast went out today. We send an email blast once a month or every couple weeks, something like that, that encourages people to go read our Insights blog, which is actually great. It’s much smarter than I am. That’s usually Chris, our founder, and Aaron, our CEO, who are posting things up on there. So it’s a great thing to check out. There’s a new one that just went out today, but I’m not going to tell you about it. You’ve got to go see what the most recent thing is on our Insights blog. Go check it out.

Awesome. Ryan, Fuel in the Tank, thank you so much. I appreciate you guys for coming. You’re always great, always tossing good stuff in here. Oh, good, Jared’s going to toss in a link to those chats. Throw it in here. All right, everybody, that was an amazing time. Somehow I just moved my camera. I’m on it today. All right, see you all next week. Thanks a bunch. This was great.