When I say brand, I mean brand as the soul of a human led enterprise. Its beating heart and the way it connects. Its culture, its ideas, its people and its purpose in the world.
I wanted to join you in developing real solutions to some pressing problems, namely our oceans health.
What all successful movements of change have shared is a clear directive to not only get legislation passed or a policy abolished but to change the ideas and values that produced those destructive practices in the first place[1].
We are in need of cultural and social change on a scale rarely seen before.
What I hope to do is shed some light on what can mobilise the innate capacities in all people to act to protect that which they love. I hope to open a space to expand our ideas of what brands have to do with this mobilisation of action.
How can brands change our relationship to the ocean?
As a field of design, branding can be defined by this simple parameter; changing the existing into the preferred[2].
A system of change.
If we are to mobilize action to support all life on earth, the ‘existing’, or our starting point in this story arc today, is an increasingly unhealthy ocean.
The ‘preferred’, or our end point, is a healthy, bio-diverse ocean.
Let me be clear, the story arc today does not begin with a business who needs more credibility in the eyes of its customers.
And it doesn’t end with the ‘preferred’ being high approval rates and increased sales.
This may well be the outcome, but we have our eye on something bigger I believe.
Communication agencies are an aspect of branding but their aim must be cultural change needed to support our collective story arc, not their story arc.
Marketing and advertising industries face a challenge today to reroute their abilities to this end. Not sustain an endless consumption model and keep the status quo while appearing to do otherwise.
Brand is the most accessible and largest vehicle for cultural ideas. Their reach is extraordinary with a depth of expertise in mobilising action.
Everyday people use brands encoded in choices of where we live, cars, clothes and packaging of everyday items that carry our social contracts.
These brand narratives are used to define who we are, to voice what matters, and shape how others see us. The brand forming an important cultural centre when used consciously.
Can we now better use those abilities to mobilize action for our planet?
Can we integrate this kind of conscious practice as good business, and as a means to build in financial resilience in coming years?
A call is coming from deep within the ocean and from the heart of our planet and we are only limited by our ideas of who we are.
We build our ideas, beliefs, and perceptions using brand narratives everyday to suit our social needs.
Like the casting of wild as villain for agricultural purposes and the unchecked narratives of consumption for industrial purposes.
Our social needs are rapidly changing and so must our ideas of who we are.
But unless we recast brand as a maker of active cultural spaces rather than a maker of selfish identities in opposition to nature, we’ll be fighting a losing battle.
This requires careful thought and a willingness to tackle sticky human complexities.
There are key psychological triggers to mobilize our capacities to explore new possibilities and take action.
The engine of tomorrow is a comfort with the unconventional.
But that comfort requires us to be reactivated as the author of our story with the locating mechanism of possessing our own bearings.
These mechanisms increase action, eradicating the apathy and inertia that plagues those trying to bring about change on the front line.
Brand as consumption is an anesthetic.
The heavy lifting, the mobilising effect of embedded psychological ‘bio-triggers’, needs to be done long before the call to action, thereby creating a fertile space for change.
To say I am in branding has not been an easy thing over the years. People assume you mean marketing and advertising not social and cultural change. They assume I sell stuff.
The stuff that got us into this trouble in the first place.
I come from a design tradition via the Netherlands and a post war Europe looking to design a better world for everyone.
A world that generated Olivetti who grew large on the idea that profits should benefit all of society and began the Italian Community Movement.
A world that generated Benetton and its cultural campaigns of the 80’s and 90’s that called for unity. The same world that generated the United Nations.
Everything you design has a social responsibility I was told. And I believed it.
The economist, Tim Jackson in his book ‘Prosperity without Growth’, later subtitled ‘Foundations For The Economy of Tomorrow’[3], outlined a world decoupled from endless growth.
Brands have a mandate to define this post growth prosperity and its post growth identities, but can only do so if they themselves are decoupled from these same notions.
It is not that this world of tomorrow is unreachable, it is that we have for too long accepted conventional narratives as the only game in town.
But like Katniss Everdeen figuring out how to break the ceiling, ‘breaking the reality effect’[4] the business of saving our home planet.
With enough imagination, with enough spiritual and cultural nourishment we might just discover the world over the fence is better. Give and take is better.
The artificial reality that this is not achievable is only powerful if we agree to forget anything else was ever possible.
The tide has turned with between 60% and 80% of people basing their brand decisions on their social and environmental positions[5].
But like the very ecosystem we are trying to save, our brands can band together to build a powerful cultural ecosystem that supports and generates better climate conditions.
A Generative Brand System.
Brands generating public acceptance of diverse concepts of prosperity, displacing the single narrative of endless growth.
Generating spaces of collective action, derailing narratives of singular gratification seeking consumer identities.
Generating eco-identities of interconnection and meaningful connection to movements of change.
Can we listen more closely to the indigenous cultures that have bonds with sea country going back many thousands of years and be inspired by their identification with the land and the sea?
Brands can transform and re-wilding culture is the project at hand.
Each brand I believe has its own unique contribution to make. It’s own piece of the pie that fits.
We are only just beginning to understand our oceans and their depths, and so too our brands and their galvanic currents able to stimulate action as we shift from making the problem to solving the problem.
Could enough pro-ocean brands form a vital biomimetic life support system?
Can we look onto our brands with that wonder we look into the ocean and ask, ‘how else can this work’, as these panel members have?
For me branding is a very rich and complex human web, deeply embedded in the subconscious, we see just the very tip of what is actually going on, with oceans unseen below.
Just as some people who look at a Picasso or an Emily Kam Kngwarray might say it is just paint but as you look, just look, you start to notice a complex interconnectedness of great mystery.
The emotional heat rising from climate change concerns, forming as clouds of fear and anxiety, will immobilize unless it is redirected to form into action.
Can we see the ecosystem intentional brands form as the cultural heart at the centre of our climate control system?
Can they create deep symbiotic subterranean flows that circulate energy globally and mobilise our resources and our capacity to act?
If brand systems can be seen as a living organism, then interconnectedness would be its heart, pumping culturally rich narratives around the human environment, supporting environmentally positive behaviour and maintaining the oceans health.
We know imagery provided by photography in the 1890’s managed to get the first national park over the line.
As the cultural ecosystem approach develops it will support initiatives like the ratification of the High Seas Treaty making 30 by 30, more achievable, as the eco-identities of your people become bolder, stronger and more diverse.
Generative Brand Alliance
Imagine a Generative Brand Alliance or Caucus even, that supports this cultural ecosystem?
One that has small community reef fish and large global fish alike in a symbiotic system of support for change?
We are just beginning to understand the vital role each story plays in maintaining a system of balance in providing blue solutions.
It is important that in every way possible these narratives care for our oceans so it can care for us.
And like the four minute mile, it only takes one for others to quickly follow and see what is possible.