Cartographies of Meaning

0:00Welcome to Visions. Hi, I'm Philip. In 1943, Life Magazine printed a map of the world, and they asked the readers to cut it apart with scissors. This map was Buckman's Strafuller's Dymaxian map. It has no top, no bottom, and no center. It's up to you to arrange it. You fold the planet together for yourself, but everyone's map comes out just a bit different. But what if a brand works this way? That is the argument that Nikita Walea, from the brand studio unnamed brought to the Visions Summit at Mama last June. Our theme on the day was, we are builders of worlds. They opened by disagreeing with it on its face. Branding, they say, is cartography. You don't get to invent a territory, you map the culture that's already there, and you

1:04help people to navigate through it. We like to say around here, at future commerce, what you buy is who you become. If that's a true statement, then a brand's meaning gets decided today in the culture, and where is your culture? It's in the group chat. It's also found in your pantry. It's found in the door dash that you're ordering it to a clock in the morning. It's decided by everybody but the brand. Today we're taking back to that conversation on the stage at Mama with Nikita and Elliott. But stick around until the end, because we have something for you, before Visions returns to New York on November 3rd. My name is Nikita Wallya. I'm a strategy director at Unnamed, and we're brand and venture studio primarily based in New York. I'm actually an LA, but also at Unnamed, in addition to the venture aspect, we also are

2:06one half UX UI and one half brand studio. I'm creative director of brand. So counter to what you've heard today, maybe, actually branding is not in fact world building. World building is presented as this pretty popular and progressive alternative to the traditional branding process. But what if it's actually not? I began exploring that idea approximately a year ago when I wrote a brand universe strategy essay. The essay was a response to the frustration I felt with the traditional branding process of picking a very rigid set of guidelines. I thought that brands need to adapt to this ever fluctuating, ever unstable reality and that they need to create a flexible ecosystem of identity and messaging to survive. Today's approach is ultimately a build on that, perhaps with a slightly better metaphor, because we feel strongly that a brand is a social product.

3:09And what that means is that ultimately the identity of a brand is decided by the public through interaction with it. And so that traditional declarative model of deciding what a brand is by planting a flag is maybe not as true as we think. And the model we'll share today is really about navigating through the existing meaning to find what your identity is. So cartography to us reframes branding as a system of orientation. It's less about control and more about navigation. That essay I wrote was really about brands ultimately modifying their behaviors to meet the moment to engage with culture instead of engaging in a one off branding exercise and building a rigid system that becomes honestly obsolete by the time they roll it out. After all, brands exist across cultural systems. They exist across political ideologies. They exist even in the self-defined systems they create.

4:12And how are they going to be legible across that? The solve is not really creating a new world, which is really just imposing another set of rules, but maybe in mapping what already exists. Holiday starts early on Walmart Marketplace. Apply to sell and get your inventory to Walmart fulfillment services by September 15th to prepare for millions of holiday shoppers. That's right. Build your seasonal assortment with something called customer favorites. That's products that Walmart customers already love and they are actively searching for. Then you add eligible customer favorites to your catalog and you as a merchant, you can receive up to 100% off referral fees on those items. So I don't know what you're waiting for. You can get holiday ready with Walmart Marketplace. Sign up today at marketplace. Walmart.com slash future commerce. That's getting holiday ready with Walmart Marketplace and 100% off referral fees. When you use customer favorites, visit marketplace.

5:16Walmart.com slash future commerce. Okay. So let's talk about maps. What even is a map? This is the Mercator projection, probably the one you're all most familiar with. And ultimately it was created originally as a means of control. So it divided terrain into territory. It ultimately was built for military and colonial purposes. And it really is this form of soft power. Although it was designed in the 1500s, it's still the mental map. Many of us have of the world today through this. It also has been standardized, meaning that it has assumed this position of authority and then in turn neutrality. But this map isn't neutral. In fact, it's pretty wrong actually. For most of the world, if you use this to navigate, you'd probably get lost.

6:18And this overlay shows how this projection actually distorts reality. It simplifies to the point of changing the world. It's not really an active representation. In other words, it's one of creation. It also centers the point of view of the people who created it. Obviously, it was meant to be most useful for them. And really, most brands, or many brands do this too. They're imposing structure from the top down, or compressing complexity into a fixed template. So we like to think that we can see things from this perspective. But the reality is that we can't see everything at once. And just like mapping, when you start to simplify and look at things from this perspective, you start to flatten the terrain. And additionally, when you start to draw borders, then those borders are already shifting by the time you start to draw them. So this is what the usual process of branding kind of looks like.

7:21You create a box. And that box is a set of semi-inflexible rules. Usually, this looks like a 300-page brand guidelines document. And it's not really a flexible tool. It's not adaptive. It's not a set of tools. Working in a box ultimately creates this binary approach. This is our brand. This isn't our brand. And ultimately, this is kind of a failure when it comes to the physics of culture. Culture bends, culture expands, it shifts, it sometimes comes back around. And ultimately, a rigid box ends up being a snapshot of a moment in the time of time. The moment it was created, and that moment by the time, as I said, you roll out a brand system, is often obsolete. And that box model makes a lot of assumptions. It assumes that if you keep repeating yourself, you keep exposing people to the same set of rules, you'll create coherence, and that coherence will in turn create success.

8:23This is sameness being sold to us as a form of consistency. But as a cultural signal stole, and doops and copycats enter the market, and what was once a distinctive brand identity becomes a trend, the brand's identity just becomes noise. When you have this rigid and inflexible brand approach, you see these big peaks and valleys of relevance, because these brands that you're designing are designed to answer a singular moment in time, and the solution to these big peaks and valleys is to just keep rebranding over and over. But those rebrands often happen on a five to ten year cycle, and they end up being really brand theater for stakeholders to feel like they're meeting the moment. But what if the solution is not to build more boxes every five to ten years? So we can look at maps to find some other approaches to this problem. This is Buckminster Fuller's Dynaxian map, much newer than the Mercator projection.

9:27And unlike the Mercator projection, there isn't any top or center. There isn't any distortion that favors one part of the world over the other. It starts to reorient how we see the world, and it does that by centering the person using the map rather than the person designing it. You actually have to physically interact with it in order to make connections. Each of these individual pieces can be rearranged in order to complete the picture of the world you want to see. So this isn't just redrawing the world. But Buckminster was doing was proposing an entirely new logic of movement, one that was based on orientation rather than dominance. So this is essentially what we're arguing for. Don't try to define the world, but instead help people move through it and ultimately make people engage with it. So mapping isn't mimetic, it's speculative. You are creating a world through mapping.

10:32But this means that brand strategy shouldn't just answer the question, what exists, but instead ask the question of what could exist. And there have been many attempts to answer that question. Super studio did with their continuous monument, which was this infinite grid that stretched the entire circumference of the globe. It was this totalizing system that erased any kind of difference in the name of progress. And this was a satire that was critiquing modernism and ultimately plans that didn't consider reality. But it's the same with branding. When plan systems become too complete or too clean, they stop being livable. There's no space for culture to speak back. So this is really the equivalent of something looking good in a deck, but then falling apart in the real world. So let's look at another answer to the question of what could exist.

11:35This is Gidebore's map of Paris. It's based on what he called psychogiography, which is essentially how he felt while he walked around. So the result is not a map of streets, but of zones that he's broken apart and reattached based on mood and based on memory. So he wasn't mapping the city's layout, but he was mapping its emotional terrain. In branding terms, this is a model for creative cartography, if you will, strategy that doesn't dictate past, but instead reveals how people already move and finds routes for discovery, for imagination, for emotion. So sometimes it's not just about the most efficient route getting from A to B, but the most meaningful one. Thank you, Dami, for explaining the rhizome, because that's essentially what we're talking about here. Ultimately, strategy and design need to be tools for meaning to be discovered rather than

12:36imposed. What happens when maps are built from the top down? What happens when the master plan doesn't quite meet reality? So our colleague, Robert, told us the story about the launch of Link NYC that he was involved in. And from the outset, the plan was clear. It was to provide free Wi-Fi. It was designed as benevolence, as designed as infrastructure, essentially providing a public utility. But this wasn't how it was used in the real world. Instead, people without internet access were using it to watch YouTube or watch porn in public. So the interface really worked perfectly. It did what it stated it should do. But the issue was that they were mapping an idealized representation of reality, their

13:36mental model of what could exist, rather than considering the messiness of our lived circumstances. So the lesson here isn't that the idea failed. It's that no system exists outside of culture. Brands, ideas, products, etc. As Nikita said, are all social products. They live and mutate and evolve and dialogue with the people who use them. So this is partially an infamous image. It's a pretty classic example of a brand swinging from heritage to minimalism and all the way back around. As you know, in fashion, a creative director often sets a mandate from a house from the top down. With that comes a logo to signal regime change, looking back into the archives and looking forward to decide a new look. This blending response you see in the middle came at a moment where Berber was trying to reinvent and meet a moment where a director consumer brands were at their peak.

14:39But by meeting the moment that way from a top down approach, the ultimately erased what makes Berber, Berber. You could argue that they found their way back to this nucleus through this process of recalibration, but ultimately a better approach for them would have been to keep what they know to be true, their heritage, and activated flexibly. And this sort of blue Daniel Lee Berber is doing just that. The casting is diverse. They're appearing different places in culture that that old heritage brand never would have done. And so the solution doesn't always need to be to touch or change the logo. It can also mean to reorient the attitude. And when you think about reorienting an attitude to meet a moment, you see sort of demnus balance Yaga and then the possibility of pure pile of petroleum's balance Yaga. They're both operating in a context where the world can feel hopeless. It can feel like times are unprecedented as we always joke.

15:40But they're meeting the moment with two very different responses. Demnus response was nihilism. It was memes. And the possibility of petroleum's response is to lean into heritage and legacy and optimism. Now could this response on the part of petroleum be sort of a response to the rising tide of conservatism and fascism around us? Possibly it could be a survival strategy in the face of this. But this attitude shift in and of itself is a divisible message. And to find the attitude, you really need to understand where the consumer is standing. If you run operations or fulfillment at a growing brand, you already know this to be true. But the consumer just does not care where the marketing department ends its journey and the operations team takes over. Because if the order arrives late or maybe tracking is not updating or the unboxing experience does not live up to their expectations, that is a brand level problem.

16:42And usually that becomes your problem because that is your job. And ship fusion wanted to give operators a better way to understand how their fulfillment experience actually compares to the rest of the market. So they placed and audited hundreds of actual real life DTC orders. And they looked at everything from checkout and shipping to delivery and unboxing. And then they turned all of that research into the DTC fulfillment experience quiz. It's 16 questions. It takes five minutes and it gives you a benchmark for where your operation is strong and where there's a gap for the customer experience that's breaking down for you right now. And let's say that fulfillment is becoming a constraint on your growth. Ship fusion is giving future commerce listeners three months of free fulfillment when you partner with them. I can't think of a better way of getting started on BFCM than doing that right now. So start your journey by benting your operation at shipfusion.com slash future commerce. That's shipfusion.com slash future commerce.

17:44Take the DTC fulfillment experience quiz 16 questions, five minutes, get a benchmark for where you are and get three months of free fulfillment when you partner with them. But you got to use our link shipfusion.com slash future commerce. To do this successfully, you really have to design from the perspective of the person looking up rather than looking down. So these signs don't ask you to decode a legend or even look at a map. Instead, they are they recognize that you are here. And that's what good branding does. It doesn't create a world necessarily. Instead, it guides you through one. So when a brand functions like a map, you have to study it in order to place yourself within it. But when it functions like wayfinding, then you can just keep moving in a crowded chaotic space, whether it's an airport terminal like this or a cultural landscape, your brand has to function like a signage system. It needs to orient you based on your position, your needs, and your perspective.

18:48So we alluded to this earlier, the idea that the final form of a brand is decided by the public. And just think about what you say that 2am at night, the products you use in the bathroom every day, things you put in the group chat, that's you making a decision about a brand. And notice how none of those examples are a brand guidelines deck. The solution to sort of that is, as Elliott said, not working top down, but bottom up, being culturally literate instead of solutionist. And a great example of this is Starface. They have sort of won over the market by changing the story around acne. The usual story around acne is that it's a problem to be solved, it's something to be eradicated. They could have quickly gone into the market, offering the most efficacious acne patch in the world. But instead, they modeled a different map that acne is a reality that the consumer is living with. And through changing that reality, they made acne into acute sticker.

19:49So when acne can be a sticker or a search can be a Google, then it's proof that a brand has really moved past that imposed meaning and onto mapping. And that moves from just doing a hard sell into doing a total perception shift. So instead of that box, this is what a brand built from creative cartography, cartography looks like. It's not a blueprint, it's a compass. And a compass reacts to where you're standing, rather than having to turn a map around in order to orient yourself. It doesn't tell you where you're going either, but it provides a starting point and a sense of direction. It doesn't tell you your destination, but it allows you to move with confidence. So in branding, we tend to seek certainty. We want to be right. But it's not about being right. It's about being useful and useful in motion. So instead of trying to draw that box around behavior, we need strategy that's situated,

20:53we need design that's responsive, and we need brand systems that behave like compasses that are partial and responsive and respond to the context that they're in. So if we revisit that chart from earlier, a brand that's sort of built to respond and engage with culture has this steady clip of relevance because it is, it has that porous ness to really engage with culture. Now this does not mean chasing virality or chasing every single trend, but what it means is reaching into sort of the center of that compass, the nucleus, and activating outwards from there. Okay, so here's our definition. Regenerative brands are systems built to evolve. They metabolize culture through feedback and friction, staying relevant by responding, not repeating. So at Unnamed, we use the word regenerative very intentionally. So regenerative branding means designing open systems. They are still systems, but they're porous enough in order to absorb the world around

21:58them. That doesn't mean that they're undefined or hard to pin down, but instead that although they have structure for coherence, they have openness in order to continue having relevance. Because ultimately we can't impose meaning. We can negotiate it though in context and use over time. So this ultimately means that a regenerative brand doesn't need to rebrand every five to ten years because it's always rebranding. So we don't draw maps to explain the world. We draw them to navigate it. This is from an essay about actual cartography, but it really does capture everything that we've tried to say today. Maps shouldn't be made to control the world or even create them. They should help us move through the one we live in and the same goes for brands. Because in the end, brands are terrains and strategy and design can function as tools

22:58to help people navigate them, navigate culture and ultimately navigate the world. Everything is negotiated, culture is collaborative and branding should act as a guide, not a gatekeeper. So that's the work now, not control, but navigation, not definition, but direction. Thank you. Every brand decision is a projection. It flattens something or it centers someone. The question that Nikita and Eliya have proposed is whether the people who carry your brand are allowed to redraw these projections or whether you need professional help to reimagine it for the modern world. Jared Smircator drew his map in 1569 so that a sailor could hold up a compass bearing as a straight line. But it also made Greenland the size of Africa. He never meant for that to happen.

23:59The map simply outlived the problem that it was built to solve. And we've been living with that problem ever since and we have a new cartographer at work now. AI is redrawing how products get found and compared and chosen and researched. And commerce is the first terrain in which that map is being drawn. Culture is next. And that is the premise of our upcoming vision summit, this November 3rd in New York City. I want you to use the code Cartography for 15% off at vision.futurecommerce.com. Join us on November 3rd in New York City. Use code Cartography for 15% off at vision.futurecommerce.com. Visions is brought to you by FutureCommerce. Find out more at futurecommerce.com.