World Building as the New Brand Building Workshop

Holition Plays: Encouraging Collective Exploration Through Interactive Workshops

Holition Plays is designed to encourage experiential learning and connection. Our workshops prompt participants to explore relevant concepts in a tactile, collaborative way, to gain new insights, reflect and constructively reshape our perspectives around key trends and shifts within the consumer retail landscape. 

Our latest Holition Plays workshop entitled “World Building as the New Brand Building,” aimed to do just that.

World Building as the new Brand Building

Brand storytelling isn’t new. Brands have been crafting narratives and telling stories consistently across touchpoints for decades. What is emerging now, however, is a deeper, more immersive approach: worldbuilding.

Borrowed from the discipline of fiction writing, particularly science fiction and fantasy, worldbuilding involves constructing believable, richly detailed worlds. This means thinking through not just a story, but the entire ecosystem that supports it: its history, geography, objects, symbols, culture, religion, everything that governs how that world works. It’s the context behind the story.

Increasingly, brands are recognising the potential of this approach. Worldbuilding offers a more holistic, creative, and participatory way to define a brand's universe. It invites people not just to listen, but to step inside and explore. It creates a framework where all elements of a brand can be developed in-depth and with greater coherence from brand heritage and history to icons and symbols, from tone and aesthetics to values and brand characters.

Digital games offer a particularly obvious and prominent way to bring these worlds to life, as seen with examples like Louis Vuitton's Louis: The Game, Jo Malone London's Virtual Townhouse or BMW’s Joytopia, where audiences can actively engage with brand universes.

Additionally, Transmedia Storytelling, from Henry Jenkins, highlights the importance of telling a world’s story across multiple platforms and mediums, each expanding on the narrative and offering new ways for audiences to connect. This approach builds on the idea of consistent brand storytelling but adds the complexity and depth of constructing a holistic, immersive world.

So, why now?

There are many different factors driving this trend. One is a growing cultural appetite for escapism. In a world that feels politically and economically unstable, and where we’re constantly bombarded with information, consumers crave richer, more meaningful experiences. Brands that embrace worldbuilding can offer immersive spaces for imaginative escape and genuine connection.

Meanwhile, as competition intensifies in saturated markets, worldbuilding enables brands to create something truly authentic, multidimensional, and distinct. 

Ultimately, worldbuilding advances the move away from passive consumption toward more participatory, immersive experiences, where customers don’t just observe a brand story but actively engage with and shape it.

On Worlds & Games 

We started the workshop with Anita Benko, Head of Strategy and UX at Holition, inviting participants to think about worldbuilding’s growing relevance for brands. This was followed by a talk from Dr. Martin Dechant, Lecturer in Digital Mental Health at UCL, who explored worldbuilding and game design, a widely recognised field where brands increasingly display their worlds in immersive and interactive ways.

Martin walked us through the different types of “fun” that games can offer, whether it’s through hardship, relaxation, reflection, or other emotional experiences, and how different genres and mechanics of games are designed to deliver these in distinct ways. He also touched on the ethical side of designing games and immersive platforms, emphasising the importance of ensuring that escapism doesn't lead people to disengage entirely from their realities.

Interactive Worldbuilding Exercise

Next, participants worked in groups and chose a brand they were familiar with to build a world for. They began by reflecting on the brand’s core values, target audience, tone, and the desired emotion they’d like to evoke in that audience.

From there, they moved on to mapping out key characteristics of the world, including the setting, inhabitants, lore, tone and aesthetics, objects and symbols, and how these different elements can be represented or expanded upon across various platforms and mediums, such as products, physical spaces, or exhibitions.

Participants transported all of us into the worlds of Jacquemus, Prada, Shoreditch, and Nike through the vivid imagined universes they created. Their ideas ranged from a journey back to the surrealist landscapes of southern France inspired by Jacquemus’ origins, to the intellectual and artistic realm embodied by Prada.

One group delved into the darker narratives of Shoreditch’s unfortunate crimes, while another re-envisioned the world as an expansive Nike running track in augmented reality, where the pace of the world is shaped by users’ activity levels and external factors like the weather.

A New Perspective on Brand Storytelling

Participants reflected on how this exercise made them view a brand through a different lens, and how concepts such as ‘lore’ made them consider a brand’s heritage and explore more creative ways to express and build on that in new ways.

Ultimately, worldbuilding offers brands a rich, immersive framework to explore their identity beyond a two-dimensional, prescripted brand universe, shifting instead to one that is fast-moving, three-dimensional, and co-authored by their customers. We encourage brands and their partners to intentionally embrace and actively practice this powerful approach to brand storytelling.

Stay tuned for our next Holition Plays workshop.

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To learn more about how you can get involved with our Holition Explores initiatives, send us an email at marketing@holition.com