Capturing the Collective Imagination

Most brand strategies don’t fail because the thinking was wrong. They fail because the thinking was shallow, built on what’s trending rather than on what’s true. In a world of endless options, the brands that tap into something deeper find their way into the subconscious narratives that shape how people see themselves and what they desire.

Short-term trends can offer a sugar rush, a spike of attention, a moment of relevance, but they lack real depth of meaning. They rarely survive contact with a changing world. The brands that last are built on something more foundational: the stories a culture tells about itself, stories so deeply embedded that people can’t always articulate them, but instinctively know them to be true.

The primary tool we use to get there is Applied Semiotics: a form of cultural analysis which seeks to identify and understand the building blocks of culture, the subconscious, collective narratives that underpin what we believe and how we act. By understanding these and tapping into things people can’t necessarily articulate but instinctively know to be true, we are able to craft brand positionings that capture the collective imagination by rooting them firmly in collective culture.

Culture is made up of the assumptions we make and the stories we tell about the way things are. Our Applied Semiotics asks questions, analyses and explores these dynamics to gain deep insight into how ideas live in culture. This lays the foundations for brands to develop their own unique perspective on the world and unlock a truly differentiated positioning.

What exactly we analyse depends on the question we ask. Each semiotic analysis is a bespoke response to the brand’s context, challenge and ambition. The main difference at Here is the way we engage with Semiotics in its direct application: whilst asking the big questions about culture, we know we are going to have to express this as part of a design ecosystem, through the brand identity and wider brand world. It provides a level of focus and realism, and the literal tools, ideas, words, symbols, colours, that we need to build unique brands which connect directly and build into and onto existing culture.

As a B-Corp, we are committed to doing all we can to ensure our work is as beneficial to as many people, communities and the planet as possible. Whilst this may sound like grand ambition for a mid-sized design studio, we believe that in working collectively with our clients and our fellow community of B-Corps, we can make a real contribution by making good choices desirable.

To do this we need to build, and importantly make desirable, brands with purpose. Brands which stand for something, make an active and positive contribution to wider society, and make the world a better place. To create the biggest impact, we need to help build brands with longevity: those that will stand the test of time and find popularity with the widest possible audience.

As with any form of brand building, creating desire is as much about how well you tell a story as the intrinsic qualities of the product itself. Over the course of our work, we have seen too many companies with genuine longevity, businesses that make well-made, well-intentioned products, lose ground to more rapacious competitors who care less about quality, labour or environmental standards but who understand how to harness the power of marketing to create popularity and desire. Marketing is a neutral tool. Whether it is used positively or negatively lies in the hands of the person who wields it. At Here, we believe we can use it as a positive force.

From Global to Hyper-Local

The power of Semiotics is that it can be harnessed to create longevity and popularity for both brands which need to speak to a global audience and for those which need to tell specific, local stories.

At a global scale, we did an exploration into the meaning of outdoor cooking for the iconic grill brand Weber. By looking across cultures, from the USA, to Europe to Asia, we identified a wonderful mosaic of nuance and meaning with widely ranging attitudes and usages (not just sausages!). One thing stood out across all of them; cooking outdoors represented a moment of liberation (from the routine of the kitchen) and of connection (with friends and family) that was a special moment in everyday life. There is something primal in a communal gathering around a fire or hearth that transcends cultural differences and this became our foundational narrative for the brand. This understanding created a brand positioning that could unify the brand globally despite radically different grilling behaviours across countries and gave us a rich layered narrative with deep cultural resonance that can stand the test of time and keep inspiring new interpretations without shifting the centre of gravity. It has infused everything we do with Weber, from developing a new brand positioning to informing the narrative of their Weber Forever campaign.

We worked with Allpress Espresso, a New Zealand success story built by its charismatic founder Mike Allpress (coffee was, it seems, his destiny) — that understated, globally-minded innovator — to articulate their cultural purpose in an overcrowded category. We studied the dynamics of coffee culture in their key markets: New Zealand, Australia, London and Tokyo. What we found was that coffee isn't just a product; it is a ritual for modern life. More cultural than commercial, it affirms a set of values and awakens new ideas. It is the constant that enables change. Allpress' strength lay in uniting independent thinkers, and we made that the centre of gravity. We socialised the new positioning with global teams and customers through the world's first strategic comic, with the richness of the semiotics unlocking not just deep narratives but the building blocks of the design language with which to express them. The positioning later supported the sale of Allpress to Asahi, a reminder that cultural depth and commercial value are natural bed partners.

And at the hyper-local, we worked with The Newt in Somerset, England, to refresh and redesign the brand identity and packaging for their home-grown cyders. Cyder, to use the local spelling, is a category which has become much maligned, but it is one with a history as deep and illustrious as wine. It is a drink with mythic origins, one that shaped and defined whole landscapes and regions, and even led to the invention of champagne-method double bottle fermentation a full century before champagne itself. We sought to bring out all of this history in our work, from the label design embracing the landscape and mythic origins to the names themselves. It has proved remarkably successful commercially, and is part of a growing revival in the category which, when properly made through well-managed orchards, carries enormous benefits for rural biodiversity and local economies.

By harnessing the power of our collective imagination through deep cultural analysis, we can create sustainable, long-term desire for the brands we work with. Semiotics gives us the cultural map: what a society believes, what it values, what it reaches for.

If you are curious about what semiotics could unlock for your brand, get in touch.

In our next article, we take this further. Culture alone is no longer the whole story. In an age when individual behaviour can be understood at a granularity that was unimaginable a decade ago, a new question emerges. How do we marry the collective narrative with the individual signal? How do we transform that equation into something more?

In part two, we follow the heart.