By Sam Pepper, Global Executive Creative Director, AVANTGARDE
You’re at King’s Cross station. You’ve spotted the sign for platform 9¾.
You don’t need to be a die-hard Harry Potter fan to know what to do. Even if your entire exposure to the Wizarding World amounts to half a film watched on a long-haul flight, you’ve absorbed enough by osmosis to know how to have an adventure in this world. You know the rules, the rhythms, the feeling of the place. You know your role in the story.
That’s lore. Not rules written down somewhere, but the accumulated stories, history and knowledge that make a world feel complete and make your place within it feel instinctive.
Lore is what makes a world feel lived-in. And the best brands in the world have figured out how to build it.
The freedom lore buys you
Take Red Bull. Over decades, they’ve assembled one of the most extraordinary bodies of brand storytelling ever created: soapbox derbies down city streets, cliff diving competitions, Felix Baumgartner jumping from the edge of space.
Each one is a story in its own right. Together, they accumulate into something much bigger: a world defined by the truth that Red Bull gives you wings. The enabling force to dive headlong into whatever you want to do. Serious or silly, death-defying or delightfully absurd, Red Bull says yes to it all.
Red Bull’s lore is so well established, they could announce tomorrow that they are releasing extreme sports insurance. Out of context, that sounds bizarre. In the context of Red Bull’s world? It’s completely obvious. You can have that one for free, Red Bull. Call us.
Lore creates shortcuts
Think about how cinematic universes work. Marvel, Star Wars, the Wizarding World – these franchises have built such rich lore that new storylines almost write themselves. The universe creates shortcuts to entry. Every new story has a foundation to build from rather than starting from zero.
Brands that invest in building lore work the same way. Experiences become richer because audiences arrive with context. There’s an unspoken understanding of the kind of world they’re entering, which allows a brand to move from simply showing up to genuinely immersing people.
The brands that do this best, think Red Bull, Lego, Disney, often make it look almost accidental. As if the lore accumulated naturally over time. But it doesn’t. It’s built deliberately, through consistent storytelling, repeated across touchpoints, events, channels and experiences. Lore must be tended to.
Lore isn’t your brand guidelines
Brand guidelines, visual identity and tone of voice make up how your brand looks and sounds. But lore? That’s something altogether different. It’s the accumulated knowledge and history that gives people an instinctive sense of who you are and what’s possible in your world.
Liquid Death is a great recent example of leaning into lore from scratch. Founder Mike Cessario was at Warped Tour when he noticed rock musicians contractually obliged to drink energy drinks on stage quietly switching to water the moment the cameras weren’t on them. That observation became the seed of an entire brand world, rooted in punk and metal culture, built on rebellion, humour and a cheerful contempt for corporate wellness.
Everything that followed stuck to these principles. By the time they released a skateboard infused with Tony Hawk’s blood or a death metal album, those things didn’t need explaining. Having a fully fleshed out world allowed those stunts to land with heft.
Experiential 101 – a product display, a branded photo moment, a DJ in the corner – doesn’t do that. It’s not that it’s wrong. It’s just thin. There’s no world in which to truly immerse people.
But what about brands that are already out there? Let’s take Travelodge. Currently its lore is dodgy rooms in dodgy places (sorry, Travelodge). But imagine if they build lore from the anything-could-happen joy of the roadtrip. Your room comes with a second-hand paperback to keep you company on your journey and there’s a midnight feast for our adventurers. You no longer stay at Travelodge out of necessity. You stay there because the kids remember glorious 2am pizza, and you bonded with your dad over the Douglas Adams when you got home.
There’s a neurological reason why this matters more than brands typically acknowledge. Immersive experiences engage the brain at a deeper level, quietening the part of your mind that’s already somewhere else, half-present, thinking about what’s for dinner. When that noise stops, you can create the kind of emotional memory that changes how people feel about a brand long after the event is over.
A pop-up, branded DJ set doesn’t get anywhere near that threshold.
So where do you start?
The good news is that it is never too late to start. You don’t need decades of heritage like Red Bull or a punk founder with a nose for counterculture. You just need to draw a line in the sand and get intentional.
One useful way in is to imagine your brand as a theme park. Walk around it. What’s the first thing you see when you step through the entrance? What can you do here that you can’t do anywhere else in the world? What kind of people are here, and what are they doing? What does it feel like to be inside this world?
The answers to those questions are the beginning of your experiential principles. Once you have those, you have something to build from.
And remember, lore isn’t a fixed destination. The best brand worlds grow over time, stretching into new territory, bringing in new audiences, surprising people in ways that still feel completely true to the world that’s been built. That freedom to evolve and do the unexpected is earned through consistency.
So, does your brand have lore? And if not, what are you waiting for?
