Cartographies of Meaning

0:04Elliot Vredenburg: Welcome to Visions.

0:09Elliot Vredenburg: Hi, I'm Philip. In 1943, Life magazine printed a map of the world, and they asked their readers to cut it apart with scissors. This map was Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map. It has no top, no bottom, and no center. It is 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 Willia, from the brand studio Unnamed, brought to the Vision Summit at MoMA last June. Our theme on the day was, we are builders of worlds. Where they opened by disagreeing with it on its face.

0:56Elliot Vredenburg: Branding, they say, is cartography. You don't get to invent a territory. You map the culture that's already there and you help 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 DoorDash that you're ordering at 2 o 'clock in the morning. It's decided by everybody but the brand. Today, we're taking you back to that conversation on the stage at MoMA with Nikita and Elliot.

1:39Elliot Vredenburg: 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 Walia. I'm a strategy director at Unnamed. and we're Brand and Venture Studio, primarily based in New York.

1:56Nikita Walia: I'm actually in LA, but also at Unnamed. In addition to the venture aspect, we also are one half UX UI and one half Brand Studio. I'm creative director of Brand.

2:13Elliot Vredenburg: 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.

2:59Elliot Vredenburg: 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. And 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.

3:45Elliot Vredenburg: 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. and 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.

4:27Elliot Vredenburg: 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.

5:06Elliot Vredenburg: That's getting holiday ready with Walmart Marketplace and 100 % off referral fees when you use customer favorites. Visit marketplace.walmart.com slash future commerce.

5:18Nikita Walia: 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 that 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.

6:08Nikita Walia: In fact, it's pretty wrong, actually. For most of the world, if you use this to navigate, you'd probably get lost. And this overlay shows how this projection actually distorts reality. It simplifies to the point of changing the world. It's not really an act of 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.

7:02Nikita Walia: 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've started to draw them.

7:18Elliot Vredenburg: So this is what the usual process of branding kind of looks like. You 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.

8:04Elliot Vredenburg: 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 roles, you'll create coherence and that coherence will in turn create success. This is sameness being sold to us as a form of consistency. But as a cultural signal's dull and dupes 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.

8:52Elliot Vredenburg: 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 10 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 10 years?

9:14Nikita Walia: So we can look at maps to find some other approaches to this problem. This is Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map, much newer than the Mercator projection. And 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.

9:59Nikita Walia: So this isn't just redrawing the world. What Bucky Fuller 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. But 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.

10:43Nikita Walia: 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 I mean, this was a satire that was critiquing modernism and ultimately plans that didn't consider reality. But it's the same with branding. When planned 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.

11:29Nikita Walia: So let's look at another answer to the question of what could exist. This is Guy de Bourde's map of Paris. It's based on what he called psychogeography, 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 paths, but instead reveals how people already move and finds routes for discovery, for imagination, for emotion.

12:18Nikita Walia: 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 imposed. 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 LinkNYC 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.

13:04Nikita Walia: It was 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 mental 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, et cetera, as Nikita said, are all social products.

13:56Nikita Walia: They live and mutate and evolve in dialogue with the people who use them.

14:02Elliot Vredenburg: 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 the mandate for 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 Blanding response you sort of see in the middle came at a moment where Burberry was trying to reinvent and meet a moment where direct-to-consumer brands were at their peak. But by meeting the moment that way from a top-down approach, they ultimately erased what makes Burberry Burberry.

14:46Elliot Vredenburg: 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 activate it flexibly. and this sort of blue Daniel Lieberberry 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 Demna's Balenciaga and then the possibility of Pierpaolo Picholi's Balenciaga.

15:31Elliot Vredenburg: They're both operating in a context where the world can feel hopeless. It can feel like times are unprecedented, as we all always joke. But they're meeting the moment with two very different responses. Demna's response was nihilism. It was memes. And the possibility of Picholi's response is to lean into heritage and legacy and optimism. Now, could this response on the part of Pacholi 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 an invisible message. And to find the attitude, you really need to understand where the consumer is standing.

16:20Elliot Vredenburg: Quick question for all the brand operators out there listening. Do you know what it's like to order from your store on a Black Friday? Not the version that you see behind the dashboard, but the real one that happens after the checkout. The one that happens in confirmation emails and the shipping wait time and after the customer opens their order. That one. Because BFCM only comes once a year. And that's the truest test of your actual customer experience. and Ship Fusion wants to make sure that you learn everything you can from it. And that's why for BFCM, their team will secret shop your brand.

16:56Elliot Vredenburg: That's right. Have you ever wanted a secret shopper? This is your opportunity to get it because Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Ship Fusion is going to go to your store. They're going to place a real order and document every step from checkout to unboxing. You get delivery photos, an unboxing video, a findings report, showing you what to fix before your next big sale, right? What holds up under pressure? And it's from the experts in this industry. So spaces are limited for this free audit. And future commerce listeners get first dibs. Go grab your seat right now at shipfusion.com slash secret shop.

17:31Elliot Vredenburg: That's shipfusion.com slash secret shop for BFCM this holiday season. Let Ship Fusion secret shop your brand for free at shipfusion.com slash secret shop.

17:42Nikita Walia: 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 to even look at a map. Instead, 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.

18:28Nikita Walia: It needs to orient you based on your position, your needs, and your perspective.

18:32Elliot Vredenburg: So 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 save at 2 a.m. 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 Elliot said, not working top down, but bottom up, you know, 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.

19:12Elliot Vredenburg: 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 a cute sticker. So 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, you know, imposed meaning and onto mapping. And, you know, that moves from just doing a hard sell into doing a total perception shift.

19:51Nikita Walia: So instead of that box, this is what a brand built from creative 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.

20:38Nikita Walia: We 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.

20:48Elliot Vredenburg: 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 porousness to really engage with culture. Now, this does not mean, you know, 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.

21:15Nikita Walia: 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 them. 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.

22:00Nikita Walia: We can negotiate it, though, in context, in use, over time. So this ultimately means that a regenerative brand doesn't need to rebrand every five to 10 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 to help people navigate them, navigate culture, and ultimately navigate the world.

22:49Nikita Walia: Meaning 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.

23:09Elliot Vredenburg: Every brand decision is a projection. It flattens something or it centers someone. The question that Nikita and Elliot 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. Gerardus Mercator 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. The 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.

23:54Elliot Vredenburg: 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 visions.futurecommerce.com. Join us on November 3rd in New York City. Use code cartography for 15 % off at visions.futurecommerce.com. Visions is brought to you by Future Commerce. Find out more at futurecommerce.com.