Storytelling is a powerful source. Kings go to war for the story. Populations are built upon the way stories end. ‘Do it for the plot’ is not a Gen-Z catch-phrase for nothing. It matters how we are represented. What truth of ours is captured. How people come to know us. 

Branding has often been a tool of extraction. It offers mastery in creating facades, to cover uglier truths. Show them what they want to see, not what is actually always there. Make them want it so badly that they will give everything just to taste/buy/hold/eat it. 

But branding can also be a tool of liberation. Shifting collective behaviour to create systems change. Unifying global populations around one revolutionary message. Building community in places its been lost. Focusing everyone’s eyes somewhere that matters. 

Good work without a good story happens in the dark. But branding has always been about creating the potential for a message to spread. For people to understand what is being done, why it should matter to them, and why they should care about sharing it with other people. 

While marketing has often rested on quick explosions of exponential growth, with a goal of taking up as much space as possible, branding has been its older and sometimes wiser sister. It is steeped in deep and relational growth. The kind that takes time, plants deep roots, and extends only to where its needed. 

Just as stories are passed from person to person, from lived experience to lived experience, great brands slowly create a world within which something beautiful can grow. Not grow because it needs to dominate, but because on recognising the true magic it contains, more and more and people want to become part of it. 

Branding began as a way to establish ownership. Ancient Egyptians used hot irons to brand livestock. In modern capitalism, we became the livestock. Brands sought to make us want their logos decorating our very selves.

Perhaps we didn’t feel the physical pain of a hot iron, but we have felt the pain of coming to know ourselves primarily through what we have. When this became too obvious, the focus shifted from material products to experiences. But still it was focused on having. The dream of the world, was to go from being a have-not to a have. 

The marker of success became having the money to buy whatever brands made us believe we should want or need. To create this money, we needed to work longer and harder. Until our homes became not the spaces in which we lived our lives, but a beautifully aesthetic container sustained by a life lived at work and escaped to for the weekend. 

We exchanged our time for convenience. We no longer had to build our own homes, travel to find water, hunt for our food. But in the space where we used to move through the world untethered, we began to tie ourselves to our means of security. We became the means of production and in exchange we were given the things we needed to survive. 

Over time, we could buy nicer and nicer versions of these things. The more we worked, the bigger our bedroom, the cosier our couch, the more subtle the nuances of our hot sauce. 

But now our system of convenience is collapsing in on itself because the earth is running out of things to give us. We have taken so much from her. Water runs dry, heat rises, wars quicken. 

We produced so much, and sold so much, until we forgot why were doing it. Until we returned back to the knowledge that all we wanted was a simple life. 

Now it’s never been more expensive to have a simple life. Some of the most expensive luxury hospitality experiences in the world involve simply returning to nature, isolated from the distractions of the modern world. 

Many entrepreneurs talk about success as making enough money to buy back their time-freedom. See our collective obsession with passive income. We feel we have achieved success once we are no longer the one at the laptop but have created a system that generates money for us, while we can again return to moving freely through the world. 

Sometimes automation does our work for us, but many times its done by other people, who work for us, all the while hoping to expand into bigger bedrooms. 

Not only this but in many ways we are being replaced as the primary means of production. As automation replaces much of our work, the skills we spent lifetimes building and gaining qualifications in become obsolete. 

Where we might feel excited about returning to a state of untetheredness we instead feel mostly fear because we no longer feel safely attached to our means of security. If we cannot work, where will our home, water, and food come from?

We no longer know how to source these things ourselves. We need money to exchange for them. Numbers on a screen are more valuable to us than our own hands. 

Across the world - new world builders are showing us there is a different way to live. A way to live that honours the eco-system trembling beneath our feet. A way to live that returns humanity to the have-nots our colonial society has pushed to the sidelines. A way to live that does not require us to return to survival consciousness but ascend to elevated interdependence, coming back into deep and beautiful community. 

As parts of the old world slip away, we sit quietly in fear of how to replace them. But those doing the work of reimagining are  lightyears ahead. 

How many times I meet with a visionary New World founder only to see the light in their eyes and know, yes, somebody has been dedicating their life to reimagining this exact wound, this exact gap. 

And how sad and deadening the moments of realising nobody is connecting with their work, or understanding the collective importance of it. 

Branding is a set of tools. Tools that have built some of the biggest companies in the world. I have seen these tools capture the imagination of the masses. I have seen these tools create swathes of people wearing the same thing, singing the same song, making the same choice, trusting without knowing why. 

I founded Secret Language on the belief that branding can be a tool of liberation. That the master’s tools can in fact dismantle the master’s house (sorry, Audre Lorde). 

I do not want to create more sheep. But I do want to create more magic. The magic of people uniting around beauty, around change, around possibility. 

And when we unravel branding from the ways it has been used to capture, own and dominate, we find a very different set of tools sitting underneath it. 

The tools of sharing, speaking, storytelling. The tools of alignment, consensus, community building. 

One of our primary skills as brand strategists is uncovering the deepest purpose of an organisation and working to align many different voices around that one mission. 

We translate the big vision of 100 mile-an-hour founders into practical action steps that every single person at a company can understand and make real. 

We are the ones who get called when department heads cannot agree, when product propositions seem to counteract each other, when there are so many things going on and no clear sense of what brings any of them together or why anyone should care. 

Why do they call us? Because story is bigger than ego. The story is the neutral party. It is no longer about who owns what idea. But instead what idea is so powerful no-one can deny how it makes them feel when they say it out loud. 

Systems change is serious business. It is the most important work of our time. We do not have time to let systems change work happen in silence, in the dark, hoping the work will speak for itself. 

Because what is the most ancient technology in the world? Sharing. Sharing what you are doing. Sharing why it is important. 

Sharing gets you to new answers. It brings new energy, support and light to your path. It turns the unknown into a question answered together. 

And you know what? 

We need the good work to actually work. We deserve for the good work to actually win. When we work for the collective, rather than for our own individual success, we cast a spell into the world that creates an elevated consciousness for everyone. 

When this spell was cast upon me, through witnessing the revolutionary work of others, I realised I could no longer care just that I ate. I suddenly wanted everybody to eat. 

My big bedroom and cosy couch and exquisite hot sauce was not enough anymore. I could no longer buy without feeling. I could no longer work without love. I realised that work without love is slavery. My birthright is not slavery. It is peace, freedom, wealth and joy. 

Imagine if every person on the planet could feel that way. 

Imagine if every powerful leader outsourcing their happiness to escapism could be returned to the fact they will never be truly happy until they connect to the joy, pain, pleasure and hopelessness of every other human on this planet. 

Imagine if everyone building the New World right where they are could count on people actually adopting a new and regenerative way of doing things rather than settling for a familiar but extractive model. 

Imagine if the tools of branding could make all these things possible. 

Branding is a hot iron. But we are human, not livestock. We cannot be branded. We cannot be owned. Though they tried. 

Instead of branding ourselves, or each other, we can finally raise our brands up as torches, to light the way ahead. 

Branding the New World actually means un-branding it. 

By dissolving the safe and familiar illusions that have been killing us slowly, we free up more light to shine on the many regenerative solutions swirling all around us, which stand ready to usher us into a different, and undeniable future.