Every Brand Is a Fiction
Let me begin with a statement that should be obvious but apparently is not: every brand is a fiction. Not a lie — a fiction. The distinction matters. A lie is a false statement intended to deceive. A fiction is an imaginative construction that both creator and audience agree to treat as if it were real, while knowing, at some level, that it is not. A lie hides its nature. A fiction reveals it — or at least makes it available for discovery.
When Nike says "Just Do It," no one believes that Nike, as a corporate entity, possesses a motivational philosophy. Nike is a publicly traded company that manufactures and sells athletic footwear and apparel. It does not believe in anything. It cannot — it is a legal abstraction, a network of contracts and capital flows. But "Just Do It" is not a lie. It is a fiction: a narrative framework within which the act of buying a pair of shoes can be experienced as an act of self-determination. Both Nike and the consumer participate in this fiction knowingly. This is its genius.
The Willing Suspension of Disbelief
Coleridge coined the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief" to describe the reader's relationship to literary fiction. The reader of a novel knows that the events depicted are not real. But they agree, for the duration of the reading experience, to act as if they were. This agreement is not passive; it is an active, creative act. The reader chooses to believe, and in choosing, produces the pleasure of fiction.
Brand engagement operates by the same mechanism. The consumer of Apple products knows, at some level, that Apple is a corporation motivated by profit. They know that the elegance of the product design is a competitive strategy, not an expression of some inner corporate soul. They know that "Think Different" is an advertising slogan, not a philosophical manifesto. But they choose to suspend this knowledge — to participate in the fiction that Apple is something more than a company, that buying its products is something more than a transaction.
This is not stupidity. It is the same cognitive operation that allows a person to cry at a film or feel suspense during a novel. We are capable of believing and not believing simultaneously. We can hold the fiction and the reality in mind at the same time, allowing each to enrich the other. The brand experience, like the aesthetic experience, exists in this doubled space — in the gap between knowing and feeling, between analysis and affect.
World-Building
The best brands are, essentially, works of world-building. They create a coherent imaginative universe with its own logic, its own aesthetics, its own values. Apple's world is one of clean surfaces, intuitive interactions, and creative empowerment. Harley-Davidson's world is one of open roads, individual freedom, and vaguely outlaw masculinity. Ralph Lauren's world is one of old-money East Coast aristocracy — a world of polo matches and weathered Adirondack chairs that Ralph Lauren, born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx, invented whole cloth.
The Ralph Lauren case is particularly instructive because the fiction is so transparent. Everyone knows that Ralph Lauren the brand is not a window onto an actual WASP aristocratic lifestyle. It is a fiction — an extraordinarily detailed and internally consistent fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. The stores are stage sets. The catalogs are novellas. The clothing is costume. And yet the fiction works. People buy into it — literally — not despite its artificiality but because of it. The fiction provides something that reality cannot: a complete, coherent, aesthetically unified world in which every object belongs and nothing is accidental.
Tolkien, in his essay "On Fairy-Stories," argued that the power of fiction lies in what he called "sub-creation" — the construction of a Secondary World that has its own internal laws and consistency. The reader enters this world and, for the duration of the experience, lives within its logic. The Secondary World does not need to correspond to the Primary World (reality); it needs only to be internally coherent. Brand worlds operate on the same principle. They do not need to be true. They need only to be consistent.
The Brand as Mythology
Barthes's Mythologies is, at bottom, a study of how fictions become naturalized — how cultural constructions come to seem like natural facts. The mythology of wine in French culture, for example, transforms a commercial agricultural product into a symbol of national identity, social bonding, and joie de vivre. The mythology does not describe wine; it produces wine as a cultural object, investing it with meanings that have nothing to do with fermented grape juice and everything to do with ideology.
Brands are mythologies in exactly this sense. They take commercial objects — shoes, beverages, cosmetics, cars — and invest them with meanings that transcend their material function. The shoe becomes aspiration. The beverage becomes happiness. The car becomes freedom. These meanings are not inherent in the objects; they are produced by the brand's semiotic apparatus (advertising, design, packaging, retail environment, social media) and sustained by collective participation.
The mythological nature of brands explains why brand crises are so destructive. When a brand's fiction is violated — when the reality behind the fiction is exposed in ways that cannot be integrated into the narrative — the result is not mere disappointment but a kind of ontological shock. The Volkswagen emissions scandal of 2015 was devastating not because consumers were surprised that a car company prioritized profit over environmental compliance (this is, unfortunately, unremarkable) but because it shattered the specific fiction that Volkswagen had constructed: the fiction of German engineering as moral engineering, of precision as integrity, of efficiency as virtue.
The Honest Fiction
If every brand is a fiction, the question is not whether brands should be fictional but what kind of fictions they should be. The best fictions — in literature, in film, in any narrative art — are ones that illuminate something true about human experience even as they depart from literal truth. Shakespeare's plays are fictions, but they reveal truths about power, jealousy, ambition, and love that no documentary could match. The fiction is the vehicle for a truth that cannot be communicated directly.
Can brands do this? Can a commercial fiction illuminate something genuine about human experience? I think, occasionally, they can. Patagonia's fiction — that commerce can be a force for environmental stewardship — is a fiction (the most environmentally responsible act would be to buy nothing at all), but it illuminates a genuine tension in contemporary life: the desire to live ethically within an economic system that makes ethical living nearly impossible. The fiction does not resolve this tension; it holds it open, makes it visible, gives it a shape.
IKEA's fiction — that good design should be accessible to everyone, that the domestic space is a site of democratic self-expression — is similarly productive. It is, strictly speaking, false (IKEA's furniture is not well-designed in any serious architectural sense, and the "democratic" aesthetic it promotes is remarkably uniform). But the fiction addresses a real desire: the desire to make one's home beautiful without wealth, to participate in the world of design without the cultural capital that has traditionally gatekept it.
The fictions that fail are the ones that are either too cynical (they promise nothing and deliver it) or too earnest (they promise everything and cannot deliver it). The sweet spot is the fiction that acknowledges, however subtly, its own fictional nature — that winks at the audience even as it invites them to believe. The fiction that says: we are both pretending here, and the pretense is part of the pleasure.
Is there a brand that achieves this? I keep looking for one. Perhaps the closest is a brand that simply makes something good and sells it without too much commentary — a brand whose fiction is minimal enough to be almost honest. But then, wouldn't that just be a product?
And when was the last time anyone bought just a product?