What is a Brand World? An intro to worldbuilding for small businesses

There’s a term I use in just about every area of my business: brand world.

And inevitably, one of the first questions I get from people who have just joined my audience is, “what is a brand world?”

Here’s my answer to that question:

Deep down, we all just want to connect with people who light up about the same stuff as us.

We all want to be part of something bigger, even if it’s about something seemingly small. Whether it’s simply the way we prep our morning coffee, or as huge as how to simultaneously navigate motherhood and entrepreneurship, any brand can offer their audience a flag to rally behind and say, “people like us do things like this.”

The way forward is to create a brand world people can connect with and feel seen by. Where they can understand that they are not alone. Creating a brand world gives your audience agency to explore at their own pace and raise their hand when they are ready to say, “I want to be part of the story you’re writing.”

Now more than ever, consumers are actively searching for brands that deliver them real, sustained value over time and are actively rejecting brands who have not taken a stand for anything meaningful. They want to be a citizen in a world that aligns with their core values & beliefs. They want something to be a part of.

With this in mind, we have one primary question to answer: how do we become meaningful to the people we seek to serve?

My personal answer to that question is: worldbuilding.

Marketing is more effective & more enjoyable for everyone when businesses put PEOPLE first. And the mechanism by which we create people-first marketing is what I call a brand world.

For those of you unfamiliar with Encontro — around here we believe in building a business that feels easy & exciting to show up and share about every single day. We believe that marketing your business can feel balanced and peaceful for you AND make your audience feel safe, welcome, and pulled magnetically into your world.

Basically, we believe that worldbuilding is the best marketing solution for both us AND our audience, because it grants agency & autonomy to everyone involved (including us, the business owner).

I will preface this article by stating that creating a brand world is admittedly esoteric. There are few resources available on the topic, but I have made it my mission to create a public body of work that exists as a resource for worldbuilding and business. My audience & I are still learning and discovering from experience as we move forward. But what we HAVE found is that worldbuilding is the perfect solution for people like us.

So, with that groundwork laid, let’s talk about worldbuilding.

What is brand world building?

Worldbuilding is how entrepreneurs help people imagine an exponentially different future that they always hoped for, but never knew was achievable.

It is an approach to marketing that prioritizes creating an environment where people can enter & explore at their own pace, make decisions on their own time, and opt to move forward when they feel ready.

It’s narrative-based and highly relational.

You create a brand world when you speak to your audience about the problems they are facing and the potential solutions they’ve tried, then introduce to them a different, more innovative solution and challenge the conventional wisdom they’ve always listened to. You start building a brand world in your audience’s mind when you show them there is a better way to meet their desired outcome than what they’ve always assumed.

Your internet world is where a group of creative people can come together around shared ideals, values, goals, and dreams.

Everyone in your world (especially you) has an aligned answer, at least in part, to the question “what is a life well-lived?”

Some brand worlds are built around massive, world-changing (no pun intended, ha) answers to this question. For example, Patagonia’s brand world is built around the position that a life would not be well-lived without a dedicated commitment to save the planet. They have accumulated a global audience of people who seek to be an insider in the Patagonia tribe, aligning their identity with the ideals, values, goals, and initiatives of Patagonia’s world.

Other brand worlds are built around smaller, less earth-shattering answers to the question of a life well-lived, but these worlds are no less meaningful to the people they seek to serve. One brand world that I am a proud citizen of is Flair. Those of us in the Flair community (a small world, primarily hosted in a Facebook group) believe that the tedious art of brewing and refining manually pressed espresso dramatically increases the quality of our day. Could we just brew Nespresso pods with the click of a button? Yeah sure, I guess. But the routine and the art of manual espresso are part of our definition of a life well-lived, so we are part of a world where we can come together with others who share our belief.

We build our brand world around our own answer to the question, as it pertains to our market & our offer. The core connection point of our brand world has a magnetic pull for those who align with it, and creates a desire in them to step forward to become an active community member of our world.

As I said earlier, consumers are actively seeking out brands who provide a meaningful experience they can connect with and be a part of.

By establishing a core connection point, we create a shared “identity” that those who are in our brand world can step into and align with long-term.

Our job, then is to create a world that people want to be part of. Define a vision they can get behind and feel excited about. Share values and initiatives they want to identify with.

Basically, we establish that “people like us do things like this,” to borrow the words of Seth Godin.

And if you are like US, and want to be part of this brand world… well, here’s how we do things.

I believe that marketing is more effective & more enjoyable for everyone when businesses put PEOPLE first. I believe that creating a relationship with someone is always more valuable than generating a transaction from them, which is why, in my brand world, the primary goal of business is to create relationships with people rather than chase sales & opt-ins.

I don’t use lead magnets, and I’m cautious to “optimize” or “strategize” many things because I have seen it lead to one of two outcomes: 1) inauthentic, robotic messaging that people tune out bc it’s the same as everything else they see online, or 2) messaging that preys on people’s survival brain, putting them in a hyper-emotional state that leads to impulsive buying decisions. Generating a bunch of opt-ins or sales from people who aren’t invested in the journey is counter-intuitive to my long-term business goal of creating relationships, which is why I stopped optimizing for transactions.

Putting people first is how I believe business should be done.

Relationships over transactions, quality user experience over cute design, and people over metrics.

When relationship building becomes the primary goal of our business, everything we do becomes more people-focused and we start to put people first in our marketing.

This makes US and everyone we are marketing to feel like a real human with real value (because we ARE, but a lot of marketing tactics have lost sight of it).

In doing this this, we craft a marketing approach that we feel enthusiastic about, which leads to the right people joining our enthusiasm and becoming citizens of our brand world.

Principles of brand worlds

Worldbuilding encapsulates some core principles, which I’ve decided to unpack thorough a blog series. This post is the first installment of the series, and I will continue to add more and unpack these principles of brand worlds over time.

The next installment in this series discusses the difference between using funnels to grow a business vs using worldbuilding to grow a business.

Continue to installment two – Worldbuilding vs Funnels: what makes them so different?