This essay is available in both English and German.
Dieser Essay liegt in zwei Sprachen vor.
Introduction: The Battle for Meaning Has Only Just Begun.
The Human as a Story-Creature
Summer at last. And what does one do then, if not currently worrying about the global climate, supply chains, runaway energy costs, the orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar, and the worldwide right-wing agenda (now also available in Colombia)? One lies on one's back, looks up at the summer sky, and watches the clouds. At least if one is still in possession of all one's senses.
A cloud drifts by, and you see a face. A second one … and you see a cat. A third — and you see Donald Trump, maybe Totoro from the Ghibli Studios, or an old Japanese castle, the hint of a smiling mouth … Welcome to the northern German summer and to the world of Pareidolia — the brain's tendency to find meaning in any form, even where there objectively is none.
Evolutionary narratives are fundamentally somehow boring, but let us assume it anyway: pareidolia is evolutionary. A hominid who saw one tiger too many in the shadows between the trees lived longer than one who left the shadows narratively cold. We are the descendants of those who always saw stories in random patterns. We are the ones who survived. The hunger for meaning is not just a cultural skill (which we love!) — it is a survival strategy (there it is again, Darwinism).
But we are not only humans who occasionally tell stories. We are story-creatures, and stories create our existence. If the human is a story-creature, then every company, every brand, every institution stands on this creature — and therefore on a brain that cannot stop producing meaning. Apart from that, it can hardly remember anything that is not packaged as a story. Stories must be campfire-compatible. I would go even further. Stories do not just describe our existence — they are the primary tool with which reality, a.k.a. the real, is built.
Whoever ignores this builds castles in the clouds and calls it strategy.
Linguistic Turn 2.0
The philosophy of the 20th century performed a fundamental turn that came to be called the linguistic turn: the insight that language is not a picture of the world but its form. Wittgenstein's famous sentence from the Tractatus: „The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." What we cannot say, we cannot think. What we cannot think is, for us, not there.
In the 21st century, the linguistic turn has intensified in a way Wittgenstein could not have imagined: language increasingly becomes the world directly.
You speak a sentence into a microphone. Seconds later, a 3D printer three floors away produces a robotic arm that did not exist before. You write a prompt into a text field. An image materialises that no one has ever seen and that exists from now on. You (or he-whose-name-shall-not-be-spoken) type 140 characters into a tweet. A stock loses six billion dollars in market value in the following twelve minutes. You say „Alexa, close the garage" — and a door in the physical world moves.
What "Thousand and One Nights" promised, „Open Sesame", almost every smartphone app now delivers. What shamans wanted — to change the world through language — algorithms now do. We live in a language-magical age. Code is language, and code rules machines. AI language models generate reality at the press of a button. A word from the Federal Reserve Chair moves markets; a word from a CEO moves stock prices; a word from an influencer moves consumer cohorts.
In a world where language becomes world directly, who holds the right language for what he wants to be is no longer a marketing question, as before — it is an existential one.
Time to Say Goodbye: The Paradoxical Attention Crisis
While language grows more powerful, human attention is leaving the internet.
In May 2026, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince published a number that shook the economic foundation of the digital economy: 57.5 percent of web traffic is no longer human. Bots, crawlers, and above all autonomous AI agents now make up the majority of what moves through the pipes. Humans are rather the minority. Prince had predicted this crossover for late 2027 — it arrived eighteen months early.
The driver is agentic AI: a human who buys a camera visits five websites. The agent that buys for him visits five thousand. Agentic traffic grew by eight thousand percent between early and late 2025. The few seconds of gesture with which a human sends his agent replaces thousands of human visits that no longer take place.
The entire digital advertising model — CPM, CPC, conversion funnels, publisher revenue — was priced on a single assumption: that a human is watching. That assumption is dying. Bots don't read ads. Agents don't click out of curiosity. Crawlers don't convert. As one analysis dryly notes: „We spent thirty years building a web to capture human attention, and just crossed the point where most of the visitors can't be sold anything."
The paradox is sharp: We have more traffic than ever before, and less human attention than ever before. Reach used to be scarce and expensive; now it is abundant and worthless. What becomes scarce — and therefore valuable — is human meaning.
What Becomes Scarce Becomes Valuable.
In a world where the majority of attention is non-human, the economic foundation of brand communication shifts fundamentally. Reach was always a question of quantity. Meaning is a question of depth. The old economy was an attention economy. The new one is a meaning economy.
Robert Shiller, Nobel laureate in economic sciences, established empirically in Narrative Economics (2019) that viral stories move markets massively — often more than any fundamental data. What we have so far dismissed as „soft" brand work is in truth economic force. Stories move capital, talent, consumers. A brand with a strong narrative gains market share without raising its advertising budget. A brand without narrative loses market share even with rising budget.
What Shiller formulated in 2019 as a provocative thesis has become an operational necessity in the bot-world of 2026. Whoever wants to play in the meaning economy needs a story that works for humans. Not a campaign. Not a commercial. A story — narratively coherent, archetypically anchored, culturally connectable, linguistically precise.
To realise this insight — narratives shape markets — we already built and launched a new brand in the field of derivatives and certificates back in 2010 (thanks, Olav!): Onemarkets by HypoVereinsbank and UniCredit. With their narratives and products, HypoVereinsbank and UniCredit give consumers „valuable orientation".
Be Written, or You Be Written
In every market — from health-tech to industrial software to fine dining, from family-office to publishing, from furniture design to mobility — the story decides increasingly, not the product. What the brand means beats what it does. And in this situation, one maxim applies:
Be written — or you be written.
Either you write your story yourself — or you get written. By algorithms. By competitors. By bots. By random influencers. By a tweet that positions your company wrongly. By an AI that misunderstood your brand and now retells that misunderstanding to others. The competition for the best corporate narrative has only just begun, and in the coming years it will reorder the market structures of every industry.
That is the mission of The Narrative Studio: We give brands their own story back, before it is taken from them. I call this method ANA — Artefakt · Narrative · Activation. It stands on a six-layer scientific foundation, reaching from ancient philosophy through neurobiology and depth psychology to media and cultural theory. We don't work from gut feeling. We work with science, translated into craft.
The present essay describes this foundation. The operational method ANA is laid out in a separate document. Together, the two papers form the intellectual and methodological architecture of The Narrative Studio.
Opening Thesis
We work with narratives. Sounds like soft power?
It is the opposite!
Stories are humanity's oldest technology. They come before the wheel, before writing, before the state. They are the operating system with which our brain produces world, assigns meaning, builds bond, triggers action.
The Narrative Studio takes this seriously. We do not ground our work only in gut feeling, creativity or fashion, but in six layers that together explain why stories work, how they work, when they become culture — and what they should accomplish in the human in the first place.
These six layers are the foundation. Everything we do stands on them. The lowest one, the philosophical ground, is the floor on which the five scientific layers rest.
Caution: from here on it gets academically intellectual. I know this will not please everyone, but for me it is a matter of the heart. I have spent too many years in a dull marketing world, hoping that one day a flash of genius would strike the industry.
A short clarification: this is exactly how the serious think tanks of the world work today — from Brookings via the BCG Henderson Institute to the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. This is exactly how the high-tech moguls — Supervillainz — read, think and steer the world they are currently disrupting in Blofeld-manner: Peter Thiel („Schlumpf-Peter 3.0"), Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Marc Andreessen (admits to knowing no „introspection"), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, at least) …
Don't let these people shape your future.
A little comfort: I think it is fun to get to know the mechanisms we are so openly disclosing here — and even better: to apply them. And here is my promise to the reader: this knowledge and its application is of high pragmatic use.
I simply thought to myself: sweep the floor before you lay the rug.
Six Layers — Overview
- Layer 0 — The Philosophical Ground. Why we do all of this.
- Layer 1 — Neurobiology & Cognitive Psychology. How the brain builds meaning.
- Layer 2 — Depth Psychology & Archetypal Theory. Why certain figures keep appearing.
- Layer 3 — Language, Myth & Narrative. How meaning is constructed linguistically and narratively.
- Layer 4 — Economics, Marketing & Narrative Economics. Where meaning meets market.
- Layer 5 — History, Anthropology & Cultural Resonance. How brands become culture — and what culture even consists of.
Layer 0 — The Philosophical Ground
Why we do all of this
Premise
Before we ask how stories work, we have to ask why we tell them. What does it mean to truly be? Where does the human want to unfold? How do we create culture? Three philosophical currents give us different tools to work with.
Current A: Ontology & Existential Philosophy
What does it mean to truly be?
Søren Kierkegaard. In Entweder/Oder (1843) and Die Krankheit zum Tode (1849), Kierkegaard develops the model of the three existential stages: aesthetic (the human seeks pleasure), ethical (the human commits), religious (the human risks the leap into faith). One becomes authentic only by choosing — and the leap is never safe. Despair is not pathology, it is condition. Translated to a brand: whoever has not been in crisis does not know who they are.
Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit (1927) separates Dasein — the being of humans — from the mere presence of things. The human is thrown, cares, is being-towards-death. Most of the time, he is inauthentic: he lives in Das Man — „one does it this way", „one positions oneself this way". Authenticity is only reachable through resoluteness, through acceptance of one's own finitude. Translated to a brand: most brands live in the Das Man of their industry. The Artefakt phase is the attempt to uncover what is essential.
Jean-Paul Sartre. L'Être et le néant (1943) and L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946): existence precedes essence. We are not something — we make ourselves into something. This radical freedom is a burden, less a gift. Mauvaise foi — the bad faith behind role and function — is the most common human response. Translated to a brand: no industry, no product, no market prescribes what a brand is. The brand chooses — and if it doesn't choose, it chooses to be interchangeable.
Martin Buber. Ich und Du (1923). Real relationship is not I-It (instrumentalisation), but I-Thou (presence). A brand that treats its customers as functions has no relationship — it has a business. Only the I-Thou stance makes consumption an encounter.
Current B: Idealism, Romanticism, Hope
Where does the human want to unfold?
Immanuel Kant. Was ist Aufklärung? (1784): „Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen." Sapere aude. The human leaves self-incurred immaturity. In the Categorical Imperative, Kant makes self-legislation the condition of dignity. Translated to a brand: a brand becomes mature by finding its own maxims — not by following trends. Nice!
Friedrich Schiller. Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795): „Der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Wortes Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt." Schiller's aesthetic state is the bridge between sensuous drive and moral duty. What does this mean for our work? A brand does not become culture by pretending to be serious. It becomes culture by playing — with form, tone, language, image. Schiller is the aesthetic-pedagogic core of our self-understanding.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795/96) as the archetype of the Bildungsroman: the human becomes by testing himself against the world, erring, failing, ripening. Goethe's „Stirb und werde" (die and become) from the poem Selige Sehnsucht (1814) is the poetic counterpart of Kierkegaard's leap — transformation as essential unfolding. Translated to a brand: the Narrative phase is not engineering or tinkering, it is education. We do not build brands — we cultivate them.
Friedrich Schlegel & Early Romanticism (in one sentence): Athenäum Fragment 116 declares romantic poetry to be progressive universal poetry — bridging all separated genres — and gives us the philosophical justification for our interdisciplinary method.
Ernst Bloch. Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1954–59) is the forgotten major work of 20th-century German philosophy, and at the same time the theorist who speaks most directly to our work. Bloch's central thesis: the world is not finished. It carries within itself Noch-Nicht-Sein — Not-Yet-Being. The possibility that has not yet been actualised, but is structurally already there. Hope is therefore not naivety, but a knowledge of the possible. Whoever hopes sees something that others do not yet see.
This is the philosophical argument for brand work that wants to be more than „advertising". A brand promises not only what it is — it promises what the world could become through it. Examples? Patagonia promises a habitable Earth. Aesop promises a sensory engagement with the body. The Land of Happiness (Lottoland) promises the possible happiness of a different life. Every strong brand is, in some form, a Blochian promise. This is not religion, not naivety, not salvation — it is the recognition that every economic act is also an act of world-possibility-setting.
Bloch is the central philosophical author of our work, because he allows us to make promises without falling into lies.
John Dewey — a pragmatic bridge. Art as Experience (1934). For those who find Schiller and Bloch too German: read Dewey. His argument: aesthetics is not a field beside life, but its mode of intensification. An experience becomes aesthetic when it rounds into a whole of sense — when it does not fall apart but takes form. A brand that allows a person an aesthetic experience in Dewey's sense has created something that no competitor easily replaces. Dewey is the American-pragmatist version of Schiller's aesthetic education — often the better entry point for Anglo-Saxon clients.
Current C: Critical Theory
What must this not become?
Theodor W. Adorno & Max Horkheimer. Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947), chapter „Kulturindustrie: Aufklärung als Massenbetrug". The sharpest critique of what mass communication typically does: it produces standardisation in the guise of individuality. Adorno's concept of pseudo-individualisation hits the model of many brand campaigns directly — and is our constant warning signal. „Das Ganze ist das Unwahre" is not nihilism, but — clearly — the self-criticism of reason. And we have to live with that.
Walter Benjamin. In his famous 1936 essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, he coins the concept of aura. Authenticity, Benjamin says, arises from uniqueness and ritual embedding. An infinitely reproducible thing loses its aura. Which made the world of the 20th century both richer and poorer. For a brand today: it fights for aura in an age that structurally makes aura impossible. Whoever acknowledges this paradox begins to work more wisely.
Herbert Marcuse. Der eindimensionale Mensch (1964): late capitalism integrates every negativity, every contradiction, every rebellion into its affirmative culture. „Subversion" becomes a sales pitch. Patagonia activism, Apple rebellion, Diesel provocation — all already back inside the affirmative bracket. We must continuously ask ourselves whether our „subversion" is not long since system.
What this layer means for us
Current A is the ontological ground of the Artefakt pillar. We ask with Heidegger: what is the essential in this brand, against its fallenness into Das Man?
Current B is the engine of the Narrative pillar. Schiller's aesthetic education becomes brand education; Goethe's „die and become" becomes the rebranding principle; Bloch's principle of hope carries the eschatological element: every brand that wants to be more than a consumer good promises a piece of world-possibility. Dewey is the pragmatic bridge for Anglo-Saxon readings.
Current C is the guardian over all pillars. It is the reason we call ourselves a studio, not an agency. Without Adorno we would only be culture industry with better, more beautiful typography.
Layer 1: Neurobiology & Cognitive Psychology
How the brain builds meaning
Premise
The human is not a rational decision-maker with occasional emotions. He is an emotional being who occasionally calculates rationally. The science of the last thirty years has thoroughly proven this reversal — and it changes everything we know about brands, messages and meaning.
Our Anchors
Antonio Damasio — Somatic Markers. Damasio's patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex could still think perfectly logically, but failed at simple decisions. Without emotional marking of the options, thinking got stuck in a loop. Damasio's conclusion in Descartes' Error (1994): „We feel in order to think — not the other way around." Emotion is not the enemy of reason, it is its precondition.
Daniel Kahneman — System 1 / System 2. From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011): the fast, intuitive System 1 decides in 95 percent of cases, System 2 only in crisis and conflict. Brands that appeal only to System 2 („we are 17 percent cheaper") fight for the five percent. Brands that address System 1 win the other 95.
Hans-Georg Häusel — Limbic Map. Three limbic main systems — Balance (security, tradition, home), Stimulus (curiosity, play, adventure), Dominance (status, power, performance) — form the coordinate system in which every brand message can be positioned. A brand without a clear limbic profile is a brand without feeling.
Lisa Feldman Barrett — Constructed Emotions. How Emotions Are Made (2017): emotions are not universal biological reactions, but culturally and linguistically constructed concepts. Consequence: we don't trigger feelings that are already there — we give people concepts with which they can build feelings.
Bridge to Layer 3 — Embodied Cognition. Damasio's somatic markers and Lakoff's conceptual metaphors (Layer 3) belong together: thinking is embodied, meaning arises in the interweaving of body, language and world. A brand that ignores this is talking past the brain.
What this means for us
When we work on a brand architecture, we don't ask first: „What do we want to communicate?" We ask: „Which limbic system are we activating? Which somatic marker are we setting? Which concept are we providing, with which our counterpart can build meaning?"
Layer 2: Depth Psychology & Archetypal Theory
Why certain figures keep appearing
Premise
There is a limited number of basic figures in which humans have recognised themselves for millennia. Whoever knows them can position brands in such a way that they don't have to be explained — they are immediately understood.
Our Anchors
C. G. Jung — Collective Unconscious & Archetypes. Jung postulated that beyond the personal unconscious there is a layer of common images: mother, father, hero, shadow, trickster, the wise old one, the self. Archetypes are not finished contents — they are structural patterns that every culture fills with its own material.
Carol Pearson & Margaret Mark — 12 Brand Archetypes. The Hero and the Outlaw (2001) applies Jung's theory to brands: Innocent, Explorer, Sage, Hero, Outlaw, Magician, Everyman, Lover, Jester, Caregiver, Creator, Ruler. Every enduringly strong brand occupies one of these places unmistakably — and fails if it oscillates between several.
Erich Neumann — Ursprungsmythen. Ursprungsgeschichte des Bewusstseins (1949): myths are exercises of collective self-constitution. What a culture tells about its beginning shapes what it is ready to do. What a brand tells about its beginning shapes what it stands for.
Aby Warburg — Pathosformel (as a bridge figure to image studies). Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29) shows: certain gestures and image forms — the pathosformeln — migrate through cultural history and carry affect across millennia. What Jung finds within, Warburg finds in the image. Indispensable for visual brand work.
What this means for us
In the Artefakt phase, we look for the archetype that already rests in the brand — even if it is not yet articulated. Patagonia is the Sage. Apple is the Creator (with Rebel undertones). Lottoland in its brand idea The Land of Happiness is the Magician with Lover undertones — a brand that promises transformation and happiness at once. The PR agency IMWF became, with us in 2025, the Light-bringer (Prometheus). An archetype is not freely choosable. The Artefakt work means: finding it, not inventing it.
Layer 3: Language, Myth & Narrative
How meaning is constructed linguistically and narratively
Premise
This is where our discipline's actual toolbox is assembled. Five exhibits — semiotics, cognitive linguistics, conflict-based and non-conflict-based narrative traditions, hermeneutics. If the first two layers explain why meaning works in humans, this layer shows with what we build it. Language is not the vehicle of meaning — it is meaning. Stories are not its packaging — they are the content.
Exhibit A: Structuralist Semiotics
How signs produce meaning
Ferdinand de Saussure. Cours de linguistique générale (posthumously 1916). The linguistic sign consists of signifier (sound image) and signified (concept); their relationship is arbitrary and conventional. Meaning arises not through resemblance to the world, but through difference within the sign system. Translated to a brand: a brand name does not mean from itself — it means in opposition to other names. A brand is a position within the sign system, not a property in itself.
Charles Sanders Peirce. The triadic sign theory: icon (resemblance), index (causal trace), symbol (conventional sign). A brand works on all three levels — the Apple logo is icon (apple), index (bitten = human trace) and symbol (innovation). Peirce gives us the most precise tool to analyse brand signs anatomically.
Roman Jakobson. Six language functions (1960): referential, expressive, conative, phatic, metalinguistic, and poetic. The poetic function arises when the message refers back to itself — when it becomes form. Brand communication becomes art precisely when the poetic function dominates.
Roland Barthes. Mythologies (1957) and S/Z (1970). Advertisements, products, packaging are myths: culturally charged signs that mean more than they show. A wine bottle is not just a container — it is „Frenchness". A brand is always already a myth.
Exhibit B: Cognitive Linguistics
How language forms thinking
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By (1980), Philosophy in the Flesh (1999). The central thesis: our abstract thinking is metaphorically organised throughout. „Argument is war" — we win or lose discussions, attack positions, defend stances. „Love is a journey" — we go together, we lose the way. Conceptual metaphors are cognitive base structures.
Translated to brands: we build brands through metaphor scaffolds. „The journey." „The fire." „The home." „The garden." These are frames of thought, territories within which the brand can be thought. Lakoff is the most important bridge between Layer 1 (brain) and this layer (language): Embodied Cognition.
Exhibit C: Conflict-Based Narrative Traditions
How Western narratives are classically built — with conflict as engine
This exhibit gathers the narrative traditions built on conflict as drive. They come from ancient Greek dramaturgy, were operationally refined in Hollywood, and are today the default of many brand-storytelling trainings. They are not the form, but one — and they suit especially brands that are to be positioned as heroic, fighting or rising.
Joseph Campbell — The Hero's Journey. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) showed that many myths follow a recurring basic structure, the Monomyth: a hero is called, refuses, meets a mentor, crosses the threshold, passes trials, falls deeply, transforms, returns with a gift. Campbell's claim of universality has been criticised many times (Robert Segal, Wendy Doniger): the hero's journey is one form with built-in ideology — individualistic, Western-male-coded, causally linear, ascent-oriented. It remains one of the most powerful models, but it is not the universal narrative form. It is one choice among many — and it is in particular a choice for brands that are meant to be positioned as heroic: disruptors, pioneers, fighters, climbers.
Vladimir Propp — Morphology of the Folktale. Already 1928: 31 functions, seven action-roles. Narrative structure is not art, but mechanics — which one can learn. Propp remains useful as a formal analysis instrument, regardless of whether one follows Campbell's universalist thesis. Important: Propp also identifies the wonder tale (волшебная сказка) as its own form — a kind of narrative in which the miracle appears as a legitimate movement in the world, without a hero having to fight for it. This point will become important again in Exhibit D.
Christopher Vogler & Robert McKee — Story-Engineering. Vogler (The Writer's Journey, 1992) made Campbell productively usable for Hollywood; McKee (Story, 1997) carried the structural teaching into professional material development. A story works when the conflict is real, the transformation believable, the „inciting incident" at the right point. Both operate within the Western, conflict-oriented tradition, deliberately and production-focused.
Exhibit D: Non-Conflict-Based and Alternative Narrative Traditions
How stories work beyond the conflict schema
This exhibit is an equal tradition. Whoever wants to advise brands professionally must be able to choose from a complete spectrum — not just from the conflict-based drawer. Indeed, many of today's most interesting brands are organised in narrative forms that operate outside the conflict schema.
Kurt Vonnegut — The Shapes of Stories. Vonnegut's famous lecture, based on his then-rejected master's thesis in anthropology at the University of Chicago, drew stories as curves on the Y-axis (happiness / unhappiness) over time. Eight basic shapes: Man in Hole (down then up), Boy Meets Girl (up, down, up), From Bad to Worse (continuous decline), Which Way is Up (ambiguous), Creation Story (rise from nothing), Old Testament (rise, fall, rise), New Testament (rise, fall, rise, fall, big rise), Cinderella (rise, sudden fall, rise to greater happiness). An empirical study in 2016 (Reagan et al., University of Vermont) statistically confirmed six of these basic shapes across roughly 1,700 English-language novels.
Vonnegut's importance for our work: the hero's journey is one of these shapes — and not even the most common one. A brand can be a Cinderella story (surprising ascent without classical conflict), a Man-in-Hole story (crisis and healing), a Creation Story (rise from nothing).
A studio extension: the Wonder Form or the Threshold Tale. In our practical brand work, we have noticed that Vonnegut's eight-shape schema does not cover one important narrative form: the pure threshold story. A story in which the subject is not transformed through battle (hero's journey), not through fall and re-ascent (Cinderella), but through a single threshold-crossing into an enchanted or elevated state — without losing identity in the process. The best example (my own, by the way): Lottoland and its brand idea The Land of Happiness (more on this in Exhibit E and under „Examples"). We propose for this form the working title Threshold Tale or Wonder Form: a narrative in which the wonder enters and the subject crosses, without having to fall. An empirical study that would establish this form alongside Vonnegut's eight curves would be an interesting methodological work for the future.
Ursula K. Le Guin — The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Le Guin's essay „The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (1986) is the most important philosophical counter-design to Campbell. She responds to the myth of the spear-wielding man as the origin figure of humankind: the earliest human technology, Le Guin says, was not the weapon — it was the container. Basket, bag, carrier. Women gathered roots, berries, seeds, and the stories of these gatherers are not hero stories but carrier-bag stories: they carry many things at once, without hierarchical order, without a single victor, without dramatic conflict climax.
„It was a Mother with her carrier bag who brought the first thing of the animal that was first slain in the cave."
Le Guin's thesis is explicitly feminist and post-patriarchal. A story as a carrier bag is a story that carries rather than aims. Translated to brands: some brands are not heroes, but gatherers, keepers, carrier bags. Penguin Random House, for instance, is a carrier bag: it carries books and their authors, without itself being the hero. A library, a publisher, a museum, a platform like Substack, a university: all carrier-bag brands. The iconic Penguin tote bag, incidentally, is a popular merchandising product.
Lewis Hyde — Trickster Makes This World. Hyde (1998) studies a figure that appears only marginally in Campbell's hero's journey: the trickster. Coyote in North American myths, Hermes in Greek, Anansi in West African, Loki in Norse, Reynard the Fox in European. The trickster is a border-crosser, rule-breaker, liar — and at the same time a culture-creator. He produces meaning through transgression. Many cultures explain their world not through heroes but through tricksters — they owe fire, language, day and night not to a heroic victor, but to a fool who outsmarted the gods.
Hyde shows: the trickster is the alternative culture-founding figure. Translated to brands: Diesel („Be Stupid"), Liquid Death (water in beer cans with death-metal aesthetics), Aviation Gin (Ryan Reynolds as a self-ironic anti-pitchman), Innocent Drinks, Old Spice in its ironic reincarnation, Cards Against Humanity: all trickster-like. They work not heroically but subversively-playfully. In a culture-fatigued media society, the trickster is often the more effective figure than the hero — because the audience has grown allergic to heroes and reacts all the more strongly to the fool.
Kishōtenketsu — the Japanese four-act structure without conflict. While Western dramaturgy since Aristotle builds on conflict as the engine of action (protagonist against antagonist), the East Asian narrative tradition knows another basic structure: 起 ki — introduction of the situation. 承 shō — development of the theme. 転 ten — a sudden, often unconnected turn, a new element. 結 ketsu — connection, in which the unconnected elements make sense. There is no antagonist, no confrontation, no heroic deed. Meaning arises through the turn itself, through revealing a connection between seemingly unconnected elements. Studio Ghibli films often work this way — My Neighbor Totoro has no villain. The four-panel manga (yonkoma) is the short form.
Translated to brands: a brand dramaturgy that does not build on problem-and-solution, but on connection. Instead of „We solve your problem", a „We show you a connection you haven't seen yet." For mature brands, for Asian-influenced markets and for brands that want to address their customers not as helpless but as conscious beings, Kishōtenketsu is often the more elegant form than any we-save-you hero's journey.
Mikhail Bakhtin — Polyphonic Narrative. Bakhtin developed, using Dostoevsky as an example (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 1929), the concept of the polyphonic novel: a work in which several equal voices coexist, without the narrator declaring any one of them to be the truth. In contrast to the monological novel (one voice dominates, all others are subordinate to it), the polyphonic novel is a dialogue of consciousnesses. Bakhtin calls this dialogicity. His second central concept is heteroglossia: language is never one but always many — socially layered, contextually charged, ideologically marked.
Translated to brands: a brand identity is always already polyphonic — employees, customers, critics, fans, defectors, competitors, media speak with the brand and about it. The question is whether the brand acknowledges its polyphony and shapes it, or whether it asserts itself monologically (classical advertising) and thereby becomes implausible. Community brands like BookTok, Substack networks, open-source communities, fan fiction, Patreon ecosystems are essentially polyphonic.
Hayden White — Narrative Modes. Metahistory (1973). White distinguishes four literary modes in which stories can be told: Romance (ascent and triumph, corresponding to the hero's journey), Tragedy (loss and atonement, the hero fails), Comedy (reconciliation, balance, life goes on), Satire (distance, irony, no salvation).
White's thesis originally aimed at historiography, but it holds for brand work equally: there is no „neutral" narrative form — every choice is a mode decision. Which mode fits the brand? Patagonia can tell tragically („We may lose the world anyway"); Innocent comically („We make smoothies, life is okay"); Diesel satirically („Laugh at yourselves, you consumers"); Schumpeterian disruptors in Romance („We change everything"). White's quadrant is, alongside Vonnegut's eight-shape schema, the best strategic tool for the conscious choice of narrative form.
Exhibit E: Hermeneutics & Narrative Identity
Why we are the story we tell
Paul Ricoeur. Temps et récit (1983–85) and Soi-même comme un autre (1990). Ricoeur's central thesis: we understand time only by telling it. And we understand ourselves only as the story we are about ourselves. The identity of the self (ipse) is not substance but narrative construction. What Ricoeur says about humans holds for brands: a brand is the story it tells itself and others about itself. Whoever changes this story changes the brand. Whoever does not have a coherent story has no identity. Ricoeur is the philosophical retaining wall under everything we do methodically. This story we should tell well ourselves in the age of AI, and not leave its telling to others and — heaven forbid — to algorithms.
What this layer means for us
The most important decision in the Narrative pillar: which narrative form fits this brand?
Is it a hero — disruptor, pioneer, climber? Then take Campbell.
Is it a keeper — publisher, gatherer, library? Then take Le Guin and her carrier bag.
Is it a fool — ironic, rule-breaking, anti-establishment? Then take Hyde and the trickster.
Is it a connector — complex industry, Asian-influenced market, conscious clientele? Then: Kishōtenketsu.
Is it a chorus — community, platform, participative brand? Then take Bakhtin and the polyphony.
Is it a light ascent without conflict — Cinderella, climber, happiness-promiser? Then take Vonnegut (Cinderella) — or, where Vonnegut's schema doesn't quite fit, the Wonder Form or Threshold Tale.
Should the mode itself be chosen — Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, Satire? Then: Hayden White.
We choose conceptual metaphors deliberately (Lakoff), analyse the sign system precisely (Peirce, Saussure), use the poetic function selectively (Jakobson) — and understand that we are working on the narrative identity of the brand (Ricoeur).
Examples from past and current work, freshly read.
Lottoland — The Land of Happiness (brand idea for the entire gambling universe: lottery, casino, sports betting): a Wonder narrative / Threshold Tale. No conflict, no antagonist, no self-transformation through battle. Instead: the subject crosses a single threshold and enters an elevated state. The core of the subject remains intact — I am basically still me, just happier. Archetype doubly anchored: primarily the Magician (promises transformation through initiation — playing is the initiation), secondarily the Lover (promises happiness, fulfilment). Philosophical anchor: Ernst Bloch's principle of hope — the Not-Yet-Being becomes graspable. Narrative mode after White: Romance broadly, but low-conflict. Vonnegut curve: none of the eight quite hits cleanly — which brought us to the proposal of the ninth form (Wonder Form). The brand idea carries across all three gambling verticals: lottery is the pure Wonder narrative (fate intervenes), casino is the initiated Wonder narrative (you actively enter the land), sports betting is the knowledge-based Wonder narrative (your judgement transforms into luck). The same basic form, three entry doors.
IMWF: Creation Story with Prometheus archetype. Ascent from nothing into light. Here the hero's-journey relationship is real — Prometheus is hero and trickster at once (he outsmarts the gods, brings fire).
Penguin Random House: a carrier-bag brand par excellence. Le Guin, not Campbell. Telling Penguin as a hero would feel wrong — Penguin as a gatherer, keeper and mediator of stories is the fitting form.
A modern community brand (Substack network, BookTok brand): polyphonic after Bakhtin. It has no single narrator — it is a dialogue.
This multidimensionality is what distinguishes us as a studio from every brand agency that reflexively shouts „Hero's Journey!" the moment „storytelling" is mentioned.
Layer 4: Economics, Marketing & Narrative Economics
Where meaning meets market
Premise
This layer gathers the disciplines that show how narrative substance is translated into market effect — and why stories themselves unleash enormous economic force.
Exhibit A — Economic Philosophy
What drives entrepreneurial action?
Joseph Schumpeter — Creative Destruction. Theory of Economic Development (1911) and Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). The entrepreneur is not an optimiser but a disruptor: he destroys existing structures to make new ones possible. Schumpeter makes the founder the archetypal heroic figure of capitalism — and thereby gives brand work an economic hero's journey (in Vonnegut's terms: a Creation Story). Whoever works in B2B for innovators works schumpeterianly. If anyone here finds this familiar, raise your hand. Ah, thank you, not all at once please.
Exhibit B: Brand Management
How meaning becomes market position
Simon Sinek — Golden Circle. Start With Why (2009): people don't follow what you do, but why. The Why is the emotional backbone — How and What are its consequences. Without a clear Why, every brand work stays stuck at product level. And we don't want that.
David Aaker — Brand Identity & Equity. Building Strong Brands (1996) established the discipline of brand architecture: Brand Identity Prism, Brand Equity, Brand-as-Person, Brand-as-Symbol. Aaker's grammar structures the narrative substance such that it stays consistent across years and channels.
Byron Sharp — How Brands Grow. Sharp (2010) showed with empirical rigour: brands grow primarily through Mental Availability (you come to mind when you need the category) and Distinctive Brand Assets (colours, sounds, codes by which you are immediately recognised). This is the sober corrective of any exclusively emotional brand work.
Douglas Holt — Cultural Branding. How Brands Become Icons (2004): an iconic brand does not solve a product problem, but a cultural tension of its time. Apple solved the tension between conformity and individuality. Patagonia solves the tension between consumption and responsibility. Lottoland with The Land of Happiness solves the tension between everyday limitation and longing-for-possibility. Whoever wants to work at the iconic level must understand cultural tensions — not consumer wishes.
Exhibit C — Narrative Economics
Stories as economic force
Robert Shiller — Narrative Economics. Narrative Economics (2019), based on Shiller's Yale lectures as Nobel laureate. Shiller's thesis: viral stories — Bitcoin as digital gold, „House prices always go up", „This technology changes everything" — move markets massively, often more than any fundamental data. Stories are not a soft factor but economic force. Shiller is the sharpest empirical underpinning of what we do: we don't work on „image", we work on economic realities. A strong brand narrative moves capital, talent and customers in one direction — a weak one loses them. In the bot-world of the late 2020s, Shiller's thesis becomes operational necessity: whoever has no story that moves people loses in the scarcity of attention.
What this layer means for us
This layer is our bridge between meaning and effect. Sinek's Why provides the depth, Aaker's architecture models the structure, Sharp's empirical findings the Distinct Assets, Holt's Cultural Branding the cultural positioning, Schumpeter's entrepreneur figure the heroic role for B2B contexts, and Shiller's Narrative Economics the economic legitimation of what we do: Stories move markets. Whoever doesn't create them lets others create them.
Layer 5: History, Anthropology & Cultural Resonance
How brands become culture — and what culture even consists of
Premise
A brand becomes immortal only when it stops being a brand and becomes part of how people live. This final layer gathers the disciplines that teach us how culture works, how it transmits itself over time, how transitions are ritualised, how meaning ultimately finds resonance in media society — and how AI steps in as a cultural mediator.
Exhibit A: Anthropology & Ritual
How cultures organise meaning
Claude Lévi-Strauss — Strukturale Anthropologie. Anthropologie structurale (1958), Mythologiques (1964–71). Lévi-Strauss showed that myths worldwide function according to the same structural patterns: binary oppositions (raw / cooked, nature / culture, inside / outside) bridged by mediator figures. Brand positioning often follows the same patterns — a brand is always also a mediator between poles.
Marcel Mauss — The Gift. Essai sur le don (1925). Gifts are never free: they create relationship, obligation and social bond. Reciprocity is the basic structure of human community. Translated to a brand: what a brand „gives away" (content, attention, recognition, possibility) creates a different bonding quality than what it sells. The entire logic of modern content brands rests on Mauss. Lottoland gives away the possibility of a different life — and this is the gift that creates the bond. In personal love relationships, by the way, we call this approach phase: Love Bombing.
Victor Turner — Liminality. The Ritual Process (1969). Transition phases — between old and new role, old and new identity — are liminal: the old order has fallen, the new one is not yet there. In this threshold phase arises Communitas, a different form of connectedness. Translated to a brand: every rebranding, every brand migration, every Gen-Z handover is a liminal ritual. We must stage it as such, otherwise the transition becomes confusion rather than transformation. Playing itself is a liminal act. No coincidence that The Land of Happiness anchors the threshold effect narratively.
Clifford Geertz — Thick Description. The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Culture is „a web of meanings in which man is entangled". To understand means: to describe thickly, to read the unsaid. Geertz teaches us the method of deep Artefakt work: we read brands like texts whose meaning lies beyond what is said.
Exhibit B: History & Cultural Memory
How the past works in the present
Reinhart Koselleck — Conceptual History & Time Layers. Koselleck showed that historical concepts (revolution, progress, nation) are not stable: they shift, charge up, discharge. His pair of concepts „space of experience" and „horizon of expectation" helps to understand when a word ignites and when it rings hollow. A brand that says „sustainability" today says something different from 2010.
Jan and Aleida Assmann — Cultural Memory. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (J. Assmann, 1992), Erinnerungsräume (A. Assmann, 1999). The Assmanns distinguish communicative memory (3–4 generations, oral) from cultural memory (institutionalised, written, ritualised). What a brand lifts from its past into cultural memory — and what it forgets — decides on its long-term existence. Brands are memory institutions. Homer sends his regards.
Hayden White — History as Narrative (see also Layer 3, Exhibit D). Metahistory (1973): historians write in literary modes — Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, Satire. Here in Layer 5, this thesis plays out its historiographical side: there is no „neutral" historiography. Translated to brand work: when we tell the brand's history, we make the same mode decision as a historian — we shape the past as narrative, naturally (please!) not as a list of facts.
Exhibit C: Cultural Sociology
How social structures shape consumption
Pierre Bourdieu — Habitus, Cultural Capital, Distinction. La Distinction (1979): consumption is never only economic — we buy what positions us in relation to certain groups. Brands are cultural capital. A brand choice is a social positioning, mostly unconscious but precise. Whoever ignores this cannot understand why brands work or fail.
Exhibit D: Media Theory & Collective Fictions
How meaning finds resonance in media society
Marshall McLuhan — The Medium is the Message. Understanding Media (1964): the carrier medium co-shapes the message. A Substack is not the same as a LinkedIn post with the same text. A keynote is not the same as an e-book. In the Activation phase, we decide not only what is told, but through which medium — and that is a substantive decision.
Henry Jenkins — Convergence Culture. Jenkins (2006): today, stories are no longer transmitted from senders to receivers, but are co-written. BookTok has sold more books than any classical campaign — because readers spin stories onward there. Whoever builds brands today must reckon with the community rewriting them. Jenkins connects directly to Bakhtin (Layer 3): Convergence Culture is the medial form of polyphony.
Yuval Noah Harari — Collective Fictions. Sapiens (2011): what separates the human from the ape is the ability to believe in common stories — gods, nations, money, corporations, human rights. They are all collective fictions, working only as long as we believe in them. A brand is such a fiction, and it stands and falls with the faith it kindles.
Exhibit E: Algorithmic Mediation
How AI steps in as cultural mediator
This exhibit concerns AI models, autonomous agents and algorithmic recommendation systems. McLuhan's dictum of the medium as message becomes even more radical in the bot-world of the late 2020s — because AI is not only a medium, but an active mediator with its own model.
Shoshana Zuboff — Surveillance Capitalism. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). Zuboff's central thesis: digital platforms extract human behaviour as raw material for predictive models, which in turn feed back into behaviour. She calls this behaviour modification at scale. What this means for brands: the algorithmic attention economy is no neutral playing field. It shapes which brands become visible and which do not, according to logics that nobody outside the platforms knows. Brand work in the AI era is always also platform politics.
Kate Crawford — Atlas of AI. Atlas of AI (2021). Crawford shows that AI is not „just software" — it is materially anchored in minerals, energy, labour and political economies. AI models have training data, and this training data has geographies, classes, languages, ideological layers. When an AI tells the brand to the human, it tells it from a particular cultural perspective — usually Western, anglophone, middle-class. That is neutral and what it is. It is the cultural situation.
Luciano Floridi — Onto-Logic of Information. The Fourth Revolution (2014) and Information: A Very Short Introduction (2010). Floridi distinguishes three classical revolutions (Copernicus, Darwin, Freud) and a fourth (the digital): we are no longer the centre of the universe, no longer the crown of creation, no longer master in our own house — and since Turing, no longer the only information-processing beings. We are information organisms in an infosphere, which we share with other information organisms, even if they are not biological. For brands: in the infosphere you are read by humans and by machines. Both are information organisms. Whoever writes only for one of the two reading modes has narrowed himself.
What this exhibit means operationally. In the Activation phase of an ANA engagement, we make sure that the brand exists on its own domain in a form that AI models can correctly classify: Schema.org markup, coherent AI-readable bios, consistent terms and claims across all surfaces. This is not „SEO" in the classical sense. It is the recognition that the canonical source of brand meaning must be readable in a form that serves both reading modes equally. Meaning produces double value: human resonance and machine legibility. And both are (narrative) architecture.
World-Building as Cultural Compression Form
A small closing synthesis of the five exhibits
If one reads the five exhibits of this layer together, one observation emerges, larger than any single exhibit: some brands become not brands, but worlds. Worlds are cultural compression forms in which all five anchors of Layer 5 come together:
A cultural tension (Lévi-Strauss, Holt) becomes the world-structure — inside vs. outside, everyday vs. elevation.
A ritual or liminal practice (Turner) makes the world enterable — the park, the restaurant, the app, the game.
A gift economy (Mauss) makes the world binding — the world gives something the person outside the world would not have.
A polyphonic communication (Bakhtin, Jenkins) makes the world inhabitable — many voices speak in it, not just one.
A collective fiction (Harari) makes the world real — all who enter it agree that this world holds.
Disney is a world. Patagonia is a world. Aesop is a world. HYROX is a world in the making. Lottoland with The Land of Happiness is a world — literally set up as an autonomous land by name. To build a world is the highest form of Activation work. It includes all the others.
What this layer means for us
In the Activation phase, we no longer work on the brand itself, but on its cultural attachment. We ask: which ritual type is this transition (Turner)? Which gift economy is at play (Mauss)? To which binary tension does it dock (Lévi-Strauss / Holt)? Which cultural memory does it inherit, which one does it found (Assmann)? In which habitus does it position itself (Bourdieu)? Which medium carries its form (McLuhan)? How do we invite the community to co-tell (Jenkins, Bakhtin)? Which collective fiction do we found (Harari)? How does it become legible for AI, such that AI retells it correctly (Zuboff, Crawford, Floridi)? And finally: are we building a world here — and if so, with which architecture?
Only here does a brand become a cultural event.
Synthesis: How Our Six Layers Play Together
These six layers do not stand side by side — they interlock like the floors of a house:
Philosophy answers the question why we do what we do, and where the limits are.
Neurobiology describes how meaning arises in the individual brain.
Depth Psychology shows which deep figures we all carry within us.
Language & Narrative provides the structures in which these figures are formulated — conflict-based narrative traditions and their equal alternatives.
Economics & Marketing translates the narrative into market effect.
History, Anthropology & Culture describes when it becomes culture, and when a brand becomes a world.
A brand we work with ideally passes through all six layers: it asks first about its true existence (0), then activates the limbic system (1), occupies a clear archetype (2), formulates a narrative identity in precise sign language and consciously chosen narrative form (3), is translated into mental availability and economic resonance (4), and docks onto a cultural tension that turns it into a world (5).
This is less „storytelling as a tool", as it is often taught. For us, it is an integrative anthropology of the brand on a philosophical ground.
What This Means for Our Method ANA
From this foundation, the operational method of the studio derives: ANA — Artefakt · Narrative · Activation. Three pillars that translate the six layers into practical work.
Pillar I — Artefakt (What was there before we came?) draws primarily on Layer 0 A (existential philosophy), Layer 1 (limbic profile), Layer 2 (archetype) and Layer 5 A (thick ethnographic description) — we look for the essential against the Das Man.
Pillar II — Narrative (Which story do we want to be?) draws primarily on Layer 0 B (idealism, romanticism, hope — with Bloch as central anchor), Layer 3 (semiotics, metaphors, choice of narrative form, narrative identity) and Layer 4 (brand management, narrative economics) — we cultivate the brand in Schiller's sense, in precise linguistic-narrative form, carried by a Blochian promise of possibility.
A central decision in this pillar is the choice of narrative form.
Does this brand follow a hero's journey (Campbell) — suited for disruptors and pioneers?
A carrier-bag narrative (Le Guin) — suited for keepers, publishers, gatherers?
A trickster narrative (Hyde) — suited for ironic brands in hero-fatigued culture?
A Kishōtenketsu turn — suited for brands convincing through connection instead of conflict?
A polyphonic narrative (Bakhtin) — suited for community brands?
A Vonnegut curve (Cinderella, Man-in-Hole, Creation Story)?
A Wonder Form (Threshold Tale) — suited for brands selling the crossing of a threshold into an elevated state?
A non-heroic narrative mode after White (Tragedy, Comedy, Satire)?
This choice is strategic.
Pillar III — Activation (How does the story become world?) draws primarily on Layer 0 C (critical theory as corrective) and Layer 5 in its entirety (ritual, cultural memory, media theory, polyphonic community logic, algorithmic mediation and world-building) — we connect the brand with culture without falling into culture industry, and make sure that it becomes doubly legible: for humans and for machines.
Every pillar uses all layers, but every pillar has a focal point. And every pillar carries a philosophical guardian: existential philosophy watches over the Artefakt work, idealism and hope over the Narrative work, critical theory over the Activation work.
This gives an internally consistent, philosophically grounded, scientifically substantial and craft-precise method — that which we have been doing intuitively for years. Or better: should be doing. Alongside watching castles in the clouds. Which, tendentially, might be even more important. At the solstice 2026.
Christopher Quente · The Narrative Studio · Hamburg · June 2026