Written by Matthew Celestial
Ask most marketing professionals what makes a strong brand and you will often hear the same predictable list: a good design, strong positioning and very clear messaging. If you are lucky, someone might mention a clever tagline or a strong understanding of their target demographic. For decades, these ingredients were enough to give a brand a fighting chance as it launched into the market for the very first time. Nowadays, the landscape is much different, where millions of businesses are competing for the same fraction of digital attention. This suggests that those fundamentals no longer guarantee survival. I believe that building a great brand is not about standing out anymore. We must create a world where people actively want to step into and create. Welcome to the era of the brand universe.
We have moved far beyond the days when a clever name and a polished Shopify site could sustain a business. The barrier to entry has never been lower. In part, we can give credit to innovative tools like Canva, AI copy generators and off-the-shelf e-commerce platforms that make it possible for anyone to launch overnight. That democratization has created opportunity, but it has also created a crisis: flatness.
When something feels flat, it just feels like everyone’s done it before. When someone pursues their venture, we have to challenge each other and ask, “so what?”
Research from Gartner shows that 77% of brands fail to differentiate meaningfully in their category. Meanwhile, consumers are exposed to between 6,000 and 10,000 ads a day, according to Forbes, forcing the human brain to filter most of them out. The result is a marketplace saturated with near-identical messaging, aesthetics and promises. In this environment, the question is not how to be seen, but how to be remembere and, more importantly, how to be felt.
The brands that achieve this do something different: they build universes.
Think about the brands you love most, not just the ones you buy from, but the ones you believe in. They do more than sell products; they invite you to inhabit a place. Lululemon invites your fitness journey to be part of theirs. Apple is not merely offering hardware, it is drawing you into a minimalist, frictionless vision of the future. Glossier did not just sell makeup. it created a beauty club you could belong to. Patagonia is not just outdoor gear. It is a moral stance on the climate crisis. These companies operate within worlds that feel alive, with their own rules, landscapes and communities.
A true brand universe has a clear philosophy, one that answers the question of what problem it is trying to solve not just functionally but spiritually. It has a geography, a sensory map of what it feels like to live inside its world, from the textures of its packaging to the cadence of its social media presence. It has a population, an intentional community of people who belong there and who see themselves reflected in the brand’s values. It has a mythology, with origin stories, heroes and central conflicts that give meaning to its existence. It has a rhythm, a way of speaking and showing up that honours certain cycles, seasons or rituals. And it has a memory, an enduring sense of what it wants to be remembered for, not just what it wants to sell. When a brand embraces these elements, it moves from brand-building to world-building, and world-building is where loyalty, love and legacy reside.
Of course, building a brand universe takes more effort than assembling a visual identity. It demands vision, collaboration, deep self-inquiry and an almost obsessive consistency. It requires more than a designer. It needs a cartographer to chart its territory, a philosopher to define its beliefs, a storyteller to give it narrative shape and a strategist to sustain its momentum. The payoff is measurable. A study in Harvard Business Review found that customers who feel an emotional connection to a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value. These connections are not forged in transactional ads, but in immersive experiences where the consumer feels part of a shared world.
I’ve always embraced this philosophy across our portfolio brands within the company. Statement has embodied a universe that almost imitates it’s own renaissance period, where we play between research, development and production. Our skincare brand, Matte Equation, is not simply about skincare. it is about ritual, fitness recovery and emotional renewal. We’re tapping into a new area of neurocosmetics or more specifically, the skincare of burnout recovery. Our animation division, Statement Animation, celebrates bringing imagination to life through different worlds we’ve created. Even our AI ethics lab, Lightcurve Labs, exists within a defined philosophical framework: that technology must protect human dignity, not replace it. Our brands create worlds for you to enter in—and in many ways, get lost in, to discover solutions to some of life’s most complex problems. This approach is not marketing embellishment. It is structural. It is how tell our own stories in a culture where attention is scarce, and it is how we aim to build legacy rather than ephemera.
A logo is not a brand. A moodboard is not a voice. A single campaign is not a universe. A brand is a living entity, one that you and your audience inhabit together. If you want people to live inside your brand, you must give them a world worth stepping into. That means resisting the temptation to “launch fast and iterate” without first imagining the world you want people to experience. The brands that will thrive in this new era will not merely sell products. They will transport us somewhere worth returning to.