A New Story For the 2020s: Stop Changing The World and Start Healing It (Pt. 2) Will Cady Follow Jan 8 · 17 min read

This article is a continuation of Part 1, in which I discuss the collapse & rebirth of our global society in the 2020s.

The future doesn’t invent itself. It has to move through us first.

Yuval Noah Harari, author of the acclaimed NYT best seller Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind states this principle beautifully throughout his talks:

The world we live in today — for all its hope & horror — is the offspring of shared ideas we believe in. The named symbols we use to hold these ideas are called Brands, and they are the most powerful forces of change in the human era. From the first hand print on Borneo cave walls 40,000 years ago to the glowing logos beaming down from Times Square today, Brands have guided our innovation to actualize our cooperation and launch movements that sweep the earth & conquer the times.

The magickal sigil art of branding is a power free to all who seek to learn it. World shifting Brands can arise from anywhere.

In that sense, there is no brand more relevant to this discussion than the one that recently galvanized protesters of the Extinction Rebellion. The brand is composed of a stark, acton-oriented name paired with a deliberate play on the motif of the Peace Symbol depicting both an ‘X’ and an hourglass. Where the symbol itself came from is shrouded in mystery.

Quartz has called the Extinction Rebellion “one of the most defining events of 2019”. Stating that “since its founding in 2018, XR, as it’s known, has mobilized thousands of people in dozens of countries, brought sections of London, New York, and Sydney to a standstill, and spawned 3,000 arrests in the UK alone (purposeful arrests are a core part of its strategy).”

This is the power of Art to literally move people. The funny thing about Art though is that when it grows to the scale of a movement, it begins to look like, walk like, and talk like commerce.

Case in point, the fact that OBEY, the street art brand which rose to prominence as an anti-consumerist icon, has matured into a fashionable clothing line.

While the David & Goliath romance makes it easy to take an anti-corporate, anti-capitalist bend to the issues we face today, the truth is that our corporations are equally connected to our imagination as our rebellions. They were all borne from a sense of meaning real people believe(d) in together.

The biggest brands are simply the symbols of the systems that have gathered enough of our collective imagination to govern our world. Their power supersedes nations and penetrates the deepest parts of our individual lives.

Here’s the rub though…they’re just made of people. And those people?Those homo sapiens? They’re worried too.

In fact, those people talking about climate worries now more than ever. It’s no secret that corporations hold the biggest stake in how we got here and in what comes next. Just follow the open discussions posted across media from the NYT to The Guardian.

I’ve made a career of taking council and exchanging visions with leaders across the brand advertising industry — always about the ‘next trend’. Through 2019, a few areas of excitement and concern from across the brand world — such as brand safety, adapting to Gen Z, authentic storytelling, etc — all coalesced into one consistently whispered theme: Brand Purpose.

As we enter 2020, that whisper is starting to crescendo into a louder chorus across the brand industry, taking every category of business with it. There is no brand that is immune to these forces of transformation. There is no brand that is safe from their own responsibility.

The loudest bell yet was rung in June of 2019 by Alan Jope, CEO of Unilever, who on stage at Cannes Lions proclaimed that the $50B+ conglomerate would “dispose of brands that don’t stand for something” — removing them from their portfolio entirely.

Elaborating, Jope shared, “[brands] that do take a stand on an issue and do take action become not just a beacon, not just typically better performing as a brand, but have the opportunity to restore hope in trust in advertising and trust in marketing,” and continued “we have acquired €2.8bn of turnover, all purposeful brands, and we have disposed of €4bn of turnover from brands that we think don’t have a long-term proposition and are stuck in low-growth categories.”

This is a calculated, logical strategy adapting to the conditions of an environment of radical transformation in our collective values. This is arriving at purpose — not as a function of hopeful optimism for the potential of a coming decade — but of a sense of threat for the hard truths that are fast approaching.

Leadership fused in the pressure of the meeting point between these currents of humanity’s Rise & Fall; between Potential & Survival.

Mr. Jope is far from alone though.

As Harvard Business Review writes, “There is a growing network of people — including the leaders of companies such as the Container Store, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, Patagonia and Whole Foods Market (of which one of us is the co-CEO) — building their companies based on the idea that business is about more than making a profit. It’s about higher purpose.”

Consulting firms like Accenture are positioning themselves by actively promoting white papers such as The Rise Of The Purpose-Led Brand in which they advise marketers on how to adjust to “Consumers in the United States [who] are no longer making decisions based solely on product selection or price; they’re assessing what a brand says, what it does and what it stands for.”

In August of 2019, the Business Roundtable, a consortium of Fortune 100 CEOs released an adjustment to their charter, releasing “a new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation signed by 181 CEOs who commit to lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders — customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders.”

In elaborating the intended scope of impact, the Business Roundtable’s press release explained that “since 1978, Business Roundtable has periodically issued Principles of Corporate Governance. Each version of the document issued since 1997 has endorsed principles of shareholder primacy — that corporations exist principally to serve shareholders. With today’s announcement, the new Statement supersedes previous statements and outlines a modern standard for corporate responsibility.”

These are sentiments that echo a new leadership vision: to forego the stringent focus on short-term gains in favor of adopting a more ecologically, community-minded approach measured by long-term benefits across the holistic system in which a brand takes its home.

A shift like that does not happen in the spirit of opportunity alone.

Brands are entering the next decade with a clear charter, but with a still undefined playbook. There are challenges for these leaders. How is it that incumbent Brands — who represent systems & institutions that emerged from the very Empire we are evolving past — can begin to represent systems & institutions that support, survive in, even thrive in the world that follows?

Not all of them will. The ones that do, though will leverage community. The more involved a Brand is in a community and the more resources they provide for it, the more advocacy they will have. The more essential they will be. Power for Brands in the 2020s arises from their interdependence, not their independence.

We no longer need Brands to be a blind force for change. They’ve done that. They have changed the world — and lost a lot of trust in the process.

In this next decade, the Brands that thrive most will be the symbols that represent systems that heal.