The passage below from the Gay Science is a declaration of concrete pluralism, and it encapsulates precisely what I care about in designing brand experiences: the discovery of a unique worldview ideally suited to the flourishing of a group (brand strategy), and its interpretation into a concrete participatory lifeworld (experience strategy) equipped with unique ways of conceiving, perceiving, feeling, acting and making — two thirds of which ought to be tacit tradition, animated by an intuited rightness (experience design).

Get on the ships! — how every individual is affected by an overall philosophical justification of his way of living and thinking — he experiences it as a sun that shines especially for him and bestows warmth, blessings, and fertility on him, it makes him independent of praise and blame, self-sufficient, rich, liberal with happiness and good will; incessantly it fashions evil into good, leads all energies to bloom and ripen, and does not permit the petty weeds of grief and chagrin to come up at all. In the end then one exclaims: Oh how I wish that many such new suns were yet to be created! Those who are evil or unhappy and the exceptional human being — all these should also have their philosophy, their good right, their sunshine! What is needful is not pity for them! — we must learn to abandon this arrogant fancy, however long humanity has hitherto spent learning and practicing it — what these people need is not confession, conjuring of souls, and forgiveness of sins! What is needful is a new justice! And a new watchword! And new philosophers! The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have the right to exist! There is yet another world to be discovered — and more than one! Embark, philosophers!

Simply coming up with declarations of who an organization essentially is, what it is essentially like, and outfitting it with a nice stylized look-n’-feel-n’-voice-n’-tone is no longer enough. For a brand to have teeth, the scope of the brand experience design must extend fully into the design of an organization’s offerings — their services and their products — and into the design of the business model itself. Brand is actualized when the “subjective” values of an organization first manifest as a different way of seeing, feeling and acting… then consequently as a different way of looking, sounding and serving… and lastly — very lastly — the way the organization talks about itself and stylizes itself.

We’ve been doing it backwards.