A philosophy is the process of coming to vision. The developing vision is in the foreground.

A novel is a story told within a vision. The vision is in the background.

Popular fiction is a story told within the prevailing common vision of the populus, or the popular vision.

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Popular art in general is popular for the fact of its basis in the popular vision.

When the  popular vision is vital, popular art is exciting. When the popular vision is depleted, popular art falls into a pattern of self-imitation, nostalgia, recombination, pastiche and casting about for novelty. The popular culture believes the problem is with the artifacts, but in truth, the popular culture is bored with itself, with the banality of its own vision. However, vision being vision, it cannot see what it isn’t seeing. Vision is its own reality.

Only extraordinary need will make the popular vision do the only thing it can do to revitalize itself: venture out into the unfamiliar, the literary and the philosophical, and learn to see life in a stranger new light.

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A brand is a story an organization tells about its offering.

Most brands are popular art. They’re satisfactory, momentarily entertaining, but not unique, and they come and go without demanding much or changing much.

Some brands are literature. They are loved by the marginal souls, the canaries in the coalmine who already feel the depletion of the popular culture. But unlike a pop-art brand, the literary brand changes those who “get it”. They come to see by its vision – not only the brand’s offering, but to some degree life as a whole. The literary brand carries within itself a holistic life vision. The literary brand is a seed of popular culture.

A literary brand can change popular  culture, and effect its own popularity. The literary brand’s moment of opportunity is cultural depletion.