Why do brands feel like worlds and not just products?

My guest on Episode N°103 of the Near Future Laboratory podcast, Dr. Tom Guarriello, has a new book out: “The Meaning of Branded Objects”. In it, he offers a compelling answer—one that might sound familiar, but still invites deeper reflection: brands are meaning-making machines.

A coffee cup, a shoe, the layout of a grocery aisle—none of these are neutral. They quietly scaffold our sense of self, hinting at who we are, who we’re not, and who we wish we might be. We choose first, almost instinctively. The story—the rationale—comes later.

Tom calls this the “meaning stack”: the layered, mostly invisible structure that gives emotional weight to everyday choices. It helps explain the rise of culture brands—those that don’t just sell products, but stage experiences, aesthetics, points of view. A concert. An installation. A collaboration that feels like a worldview.

And for those of us operating in the speculative futures terrain, it’s hard not to see the resonance our work. If brands are already building little worlds by setting logics, aesthetics, settings, songs, sounds, styles, behaviors, then perhaps they’re also doing a kind of unintentional prototyping of dreams of what could be. Is this a kind of futures work? Providing a space to inhabit to identify with, to build towards, to assign meaning? Not just of products, but of identities, values, futures.

Is this, in some strange way, a kind of futures work?

So what can we learn from brands as containers of meaning, particularly when we are also trying to create worlds that people can sense, feel, and imagine into?

That’s where our conversation leads. Hope you enjoy the episode! Please like, subscribe, and share!