What sci-fi literature can teach us about world building brands
The best sci-fi and the best brands share one trait: neither accepts the world as it is. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl explains how stories like The Left Hand of Darkness, Hyperion, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Children of Men build entire worlds by extrapolating one small change, and how brands can do the same with their key differentiator. He suggests asking what future you believe is coming instead of what you sell, and shows how a what-if question shapes Parliament’s work with Netlify. 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 kicks off the episode’s core idea: sci-fi stories and great brands both propose a world that could exist. Sci-fi builds a fictional setting from one simple premise, if this becomes true, what else becomes true, and extrapolates it as far as it will go.
He shares examples: The Left Hand of Darkness imagines a world without fixed gender, Hyperion asks whether humanity will be saved or killed by AI, The Handmaid’s Tale asks what happens if fertility problems lead to a religious fascist state, and Children of Men asks what happens if children stop being born.
Calvin translates that to branding. Take your key differentiator to its most extreme, inevitable end. Ask what future you believe is coming rather than what you sell. And keep asking what if, like the annoying child who never stops, to find brand stories and ad campaign ideas. At Parliament, that thinking shapes work with Netlify around the question of what if every person on Earth could create for the web.
Highlights
Sci-fi and the best brands propose worlds that could exist.
Every new world starts with one small change.
Extrapolate your key differentiator to its extreme end.
Ask what future you believe is coming, not just what you sell.
Netlify’s what-if: anyone on Earth could create for the web.
Key insights
World building starts with a premise
A single nugget of change, extrapolated to infinity, can define an entire brand world just as it defines a novel’s setting.
Push your differentiator to the end
Imagining where your key difference leads, for better or worse, reveals the specific future your brand is pointing toward.
Belief beats product features
Selling matters, but asking what future you believe in helps a brand find a connection that goes beyond its main selling point.
Absurd questions fuel campaigns
Questions like what if water no longer existed can push a brand toward takes that are absurd yet truthful.
Detailed analysis
The clip acknowledges an obvious challenge: most sci-fi deals in dark subjects and critiques of the present. Calvin’s move is to borrow the method rather than the mood. The extrapolation technique works whether the imagined outcome is good or bad, and it gives brand teams a structured way to imagine bigger.
The Netlify example grounds the idea in real client work, showing how a single what-if question can reframe a technical platform as a vision for a very different world.
Conclusion
Sci-fi offers brands a fun, practical exploration: start with one small change, ask what if about everything, and follow it to the future you believe in.
Transcript
So, let’s start talking about what sci-fi can teach us about branding. I think the reason I really love sci-fi specifically in this relationship is that I think sci-fi and the best brands don’t really accept the world as it currently is. They all propose a world that could exist. And I think sci-fi stories are really just about building completely fictional settings, which, we’ve talked a lot about world building on this live show, and that’s exactly what that is. It’s about building your fictional setting for your brand.
But what sci-fi stories do really well, that I think all brands could learn from, is that they start with this: the idea that if this idea is true, or if this fact is true or becomes true, what would happen? What else would become true? So, it’s just a really simple idea of this one little nugget of change, truth, whatever it is. What happens when you extrapolate it into infinity, and how does that affect your brand, your world?
And you see this in sci-fi stuff all the time. Do I have any stuff to share today? I guess I’ve got some stuff up. Let’s pull some stuff up. So, when you think about it in terms of sci-fi—sorry, you’re just getting wiki pages today, not thrilling. And apparently, they don’t have very exciting cover images here.
So, 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, and what kind of worlds would be created? What happens when outsiders come into that world? You’ve got stuff like Hyperion, an absolutely legendary sci-fi book that 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. And this is just asking the question of 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, that movie. Great movie. It kind of asks the same 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 these similar kinds of questions.
So, you’ve got great stuff like that. We’ll talk more about these, but 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 just one little small change in our world can extrapolate into creating a completely new world. So, that’s kind of the idea that I think really starts translating over to brands really well, and is helpful for us to think about how we can create new worlds.
And so, the idea that every new world starts with just one small, tiny change. A new world for stories, for brands. We see this one small change, and you can think of it as maybe your brand’s one key differentiator blown out to its most extreme, inevitable end. And I think it’s kind of helpful to do that in general with whatever your key differentiator is with the brand, because maybe it’s a good thing at the end, maybe it’s a bad thing. So I think this is a really great trick for imagining that very specific future you imagine for your story, for your brand, for whatever it may be.
So another nice little branding trick that comes out of this, I think, is the idea of, instead of asking what do we sell—which, I mean, selling is important. That’s why we’re actually in this business. We want to sell things. But instead of asking what do we sell, you could ask, what future do we believe is coming? And I think when you start extrapolating out to that, you can find how you connect to that future.
So I’ve already kind of talked about this, but all of these little small changes that I’m talking about always start with the idea of what if. So, anyone in chat, think about this with your favorite sci-fi things, 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 when it comes to creating ideas for ad campaigns as well.
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 what they are is a web platform where you can use AI or code to create anything for the web, and essentially anyone could do it. So you start asking the question of, 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? What kind of brand, what kind of ad campaigns would come out of that? So always start asking yourself what-if questions to really push toward some absurd yet obviously really truthful take on your brand.
And if I start just 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.
So I think this is a really, really key and just fun exploration. It’s a different way to look at brands. We often try to be like, oh, what are we selling? What’s the main selling point of this product? That’s great, but—