This industry perspective is by Talia Patapoutian, research lead at Red Antler.
Indulge me for a moment: imagine you’re standing inside the walls of Game of Thrones‘ Winterfell, with centuries of heroes, traitors, myths, and magic swirling around you. Or perhaps you’re strolling through Tolkien’s beloved Shire, wandering idyllic green fields and ducking into hobbit-holes.
Legendary settings like these are so immersive that they transcend words on a page or pixels on a screen. They become places an audience doesn’t just passively perceive, but ones they actively inhabit. That’s part of the power that speculative fiction giants like George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien have wielded to capture the hearts and minds of millions.
Now, consider this: what if all of us in the branding field—designers, strategists, marketers—are in the very same business as these speculative fiction masters?
I am, of course, talking about the business of creating worlds.
Brand as Speculative World
This parallel between fiction and brand feels particularly relevant now, as society grapples with critical issues like AI, climate change, and geopolitical crises. People are seeking escape from, and viable alternatives to, their uncertain reality. (Indeed, speculative fiction has never been more popular—see the proliferation of sci-fi/fantasy media franchises and romantasy books.)
When you think about it, speculative worldbuilding and branding share basic goals: both aim to transform intangible concepts into immersive, authentic, and differentiated experiences.
And these shared objectives aren’t a coincidence. Fundamentally, both speculative worlds and brands provide the context that deepens audience understanding and engagement. Fictional worlds contextualize narratives and characters; brands contextualize products and customer touchpoints. Their essential functions are aligned.
So, what lessons can brand-builders learn from masters of science fiction and fantasy? Here’s a look at the worldbuilding processes of four exceptional authors, and what each can teach us.
N.K. Jemisin: Start With Element X
N.K. Jemisin (a MacArthur Genius Fellow included in the TIME100) builds her worlds from the top down. Rather than starting with separate details that have to be reconciled, she begins with what she’s termed “Element X”: the single biggest departure from our reality. In her award-winning Broken Earth trilogy, Element X is a recurring apocalyptic winter caused by seismic catastrophe. Nearly every subsequent detail, from social hierarchies to character psychology to architecture, flows in some way from that idea.
To build out those downstream details, Jemisin uses anthropological principles like:
- Syncretism: how cultures build in layers over time, retaining echoes of their past
- Differentiation: how groups distinguish their identities from others
- Cosmogony: origin beliefs that shape the worldview
- Economy: how resources are acquired and distributed
This approach yields worlds that feel real and lived-in because they’re cohesive, and they reflect fundamental human patterns.
A narrow focus is generative, not limiting.
The brand takeaway: Start by identifying your brand’s Element X—its singular, differentiating truth—and then build from there. It can be easy to forget that a narrow focus is generative, not limiting! Then consider how anthropological principles can help amplify authenticity. For example, syncretism suggests that brands feel more genuine when they retain subtle (even incongruous) vestiges of their history; cosmogony underscores how a brand’s “creation myth” (or founder story) can inform the brand world’s underlying physics, influencing everything from its values to its typeface.
Brandon Sanderson: Layer for Discovery
Brandon Sanderson has sold over 30 million copies of books based in his Cosmere universe (which encompasses multiple planets, all connected through a shared creator and gods).
Sanderson is particularly skilled at building mystery and filling his work with ongoing and carefully planned reveals. For him, worldbuilding is about creating layers of discovery. He told Audible that “When I’m doing my world-building … I start with the end goal in mind and then build those strata that the reader is going to dig through as an archaeologist reaching new understandings.”
The Way of Kings, for example, is dripping in questions from page one. As readers make their way through the book, Sanderson very gradually fills in clear knowledge gaps and mysteries. What don’t we know about the Parshendi? Who are the Heralds? What could these epigraphs possibly be about?
Anticipating and working to find these answers is a large part of what keeps Sanderson readers turning pages late into the night.
Layered brand worlds leave the audience room to explore over time.
The brand takeaway: Building and revealing layers of meaning adds depth and engagement, creating an ongoing, dynamic relationship with the reader or consumer. Static or less-dimensional brands may still get noticed, but layered ones leave the audience room to explore over time. A prime example is the way Taylor Swift manages her mega-successful brand world. She’s known for integrating hidden clues into social posts, symbolic visuals into music videos, and narrative connections across albums. All of this creates an ongoing sense of discovery, helping to keep her loyal fanbase hyper-engaged.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Use Rigor to Fuel Boldness
Ursula K. Le Guin (who was named a Grand Master by the SFWA and Living Legend by the Library of Congress) brilliantly used speculative fiction to interrogate society’s deepest-held assumptions.
She accomplished that in two steps. First, she posed provocative “What if?” questions by taking something society considers fundamental and inviting us to wonder: “What if that worked very differently?” In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), she asked, “What if someone’s biological sex and gender were always changing?” In The Dispossessed (1974), she wondered, “What if an entire world’s society was built to reject hierarchy and private property?”
Then, she turned those questions into viable, robust worlds. Her father was a celebrated anthropologist, so—like Jemisin—she turned to principles from that field for credibility. In a paper for Theory, Culture & Society, Davison-Vecchione and Seeger argue that Le Guin’s “science fiction is a form of ‘speculative anthropology.’” Her rigor involved carefully describing and contextualizing rituals, myths, norms, and taboos, making her speculative visions feel deeply plausible.
Le Guin took this two-pronged approach intentionally. She once wrote that “fantasy not only asks ‘What if things didn’t go on just as they do?’ but demonstrates what they might be like if they went otherwise—thus gnawing at the very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are.”
The brand takeaway: Brands that aspire to disrupt or invent categories—who are looking to create a vision of what could be, beyond what exists today—can take a page from Le Guin’s book (no pun intended). She shows us that we can take big, bold swings as long as we have a methodical and rigorous foundation. So, perhaps counterintuitively, a structured process that’s built on logic just as much as creativity is what enables visionary boldness.
A structured process that’s built on logic just as much as creativity is what enables visionary boldness.
Jeff VanderMeer: Embrace Contradictions
Finally, there’s Jeff VanderMeer, who’s been dubbed the “King of Weird Fiction” by The New Yorker. According to his imaginative fiction guide Wonderbook, a “well-realized” world should contain certain key elements.
If you consider those elements together, some tensions emerge. To name a few, VanderMeer believes that successful speculative worlds will:
- Have cohesive internal logic, but also feature the real world’s “consistent inconsistency”
- Contain evocative details, but showcase them only sparingly
- Both mirror our known world and deviate from it
These capture three of the trade-offs that came up again and again in my research. Internal consistency creates believability, but the real world is messy and often lacks answers. Concrete details and idiosyncrasies create immersion, but too many details lead to overwhelm. Familiarity makes something more palatable, but truly weird and subversive settings are the most exciting. Navigating these tensions is what creates a nuanced and intriguing world.
Pushes and counter-pulls are what breathe life into the whole operation.
The brand takeaway: Worldbuilding and brand-building both require striking many “perfect balances,” and no two projects have the same sweet spot. Great brands, like great worlds, embrace their own particular tensions; they recognize that pushes and counter-pulls are what breathe life into the whole operation. Take two well-known examples: Nike’s brand is both aspirational and inclusive, while Apple taps into both mainstream popularity and its counterculture roots.
Building Worlds Worth Inhabiting
Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that the realms of speculative fiction and branding are neighboring territories, and that we should establish better trade routes between them.
Building fictional and commercial worlds is about creating spaces so compelling that people choose to inhabit them. Our work as brand creatives isn’t just about developing visual and verbal identities. It’s about creating contexts, entire universes of meaning that unlock the full resonance of a brand’s offerings and touchpoints.
With this in mind, I propose that we, as brand-builders, ask ourselves a new question when evaluating our own work:
Is what we’re making a flat backdrop, or is it a world worth stepping into—and staying in?
Talia Patapoutian is research lead at Red Antler. It’s her job to turn consumer truths into bold, clarifying brand “aha’s”. Before joining Red Antler, she worked at Microsoft and then agency-side with brands like Nike, Apple, and IKEA. In her free time, you can find Talia taking blurry film photos, perusing the snack aisle, or—of course—curled up with a good book.
Images and videos courtesy of Red Antler.
