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I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes brands stand out and survive over decades and centuries. The term "brand" is used pretty liberally, even if you work in the field. When one says brand, people usually think about a logo, typography, packaging, colors so on and so forth.
After spending years thinking about what it means to create, maintain and communicate a brand, I think I've arrived at a definition I can apply when thinking about companies, organization, people through the lens of branding.
There's branding when it comes to commerce (companies), there's personal branding (people) and it even goes further: countries, religions, families etc... What I noticed is the best brands are the best at world building.
What is world building you ask? World building, historically used in reference to movies and video games, is the process where the producer of said media constructs a coherent, consistent and immersive environment where the subjects live (be it people or objects).
My go-to example for the best world building is actually The Matrix Trilogy (The Matrix, The Animatrix, Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolutions and several video games). It's my favorite for two reasons. One, their world building is borderline too immersive; it's painfully coherent and consistent. The Wachowskis did a phenomenal job at constructing environments where the subjects are an extension of the environment. Everything from how they looked, how they talked, how they dressed. It's peak Y2K. The second reason it's my favorite is because the trilogy, in a kind of inception way, is an exercise in world building itself. When the subjects are in the Matrix, the tinting of the footage is green and when they are in the "real world", the tinting is blue. The Wachowskis are telling the audience "hey, these two things are very different" in a very, very subtle way. They also do that by making the characters wear sunglasses in the Matrix when they don't in the real world, the raggedy clothes they wear in the real world versus the crisp outfits in the Matrix etc... There's a myriad of other reasons to use The Matrix as a great example:
Honorable mentions in the movie/show category: Dune, Severance
Growing up, I was obsessed with Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece cultures, including their mythology. It was a world you can get lost in and totally immerse yourself in. I don't think you can find a clearer example of (physical) world building than what the ancient Egyptians consistently did for thousands of years. What's impressive about their world building wasn't just how immersive and consistent it was and still is, it's the sheer amount of time is survived. When world building is done well, I truly believe it can survive indefinitely. You can look at virtually anything the ancient Egyptians did and know exactly who/what was behind it and what world it belongs too.
Kanye West/Ye is a great example of world building but in a different way. He builds very immersive worlds for each album roll out. This is even harder to do because each world is completely unrelated and completely unique than not just his previous work but anything anyone's ever done. Each album or era lives in its own very different universe, with Kanye West being the only consistent figure in each one. I'd argue that even each "Kanye West" in these eras is a completely different person, and I think that's the actual message he's trying to communicate. You can look at a picture and almost immediately point out which Kanye West era or world it belongs to. Being able to construct worlds every few years is impressive. The stage design, the clothes, the music itself, including the lyrics, tempo, instruments used are neatly packaged in their own universes frozen in time for eternity.
Dyson's products are not my cup of tea from a design perspective, although I do own than bladeless fan. That being said, when it comes to a company, Dyson does a pretty good job at world building with their products. Their products are consistent and easily identifiable as belonging to their family of products. But that's as far as it goes. Because they cater to a very large and diverse audience of day to day customers, they have to be careful not to over do it. The problem is, for companies, the wider your customer base becomes, the more you have to tone down your world building. Early on, it's very important to do the opposite, you want to construct a very consistent and obvious world to build a loyal customer base. But companies need to grow, so you start loosening your world building, your ads start becoming more mainstream, even if your products remain consistent. There's a way to combat this: you do what companies like P&G do, you start new brands with their own worlds. My favorite P&G brand being Old Spice. There's plenty of other companies in this Dyson category that do product consistency well but fall short of completely immersing you, but again, that's the most likely outcome of growing.
I sense that you want me to mention Apple here so here it is: I believe Apple is the total absence of world building. Are their products consistent? Yes. Can you identify an Apple product without context just by looking at it? I think so. But their **current** world building is meant to mute itself deliberately so the customer can project their worlds onto them. They are the canvas in which you build your world into as a user, which is equally respectable (and potentially harder). I just don't think extremely minimal, metallic, rectangular products qualify as world building, even if they are very consistent. I do think Dieter Rams during his time at Braun and Vitsœ did some of the best world building which obviously was the foundation for Apple's early actual world building efforts under Steve Jobs' return. This is obviously a personal opinion not fact.
It's actually very easy: be yourself. Okay seriously, what I'm trying to communicate is you not only do you need to be yourself, you need to dig deep at what makes you because nobody else can do it. That's your advantage. There is a reason most large corporations (ones trying to world-build) can't world build to save themselves: there's too many hands at play. Constantly changing agencies, churn at the C-suite and following hype cycles. You're a unique, random string of molecules, experiences and memories. Nobody else can create what you can if the inspiration is being generated by the randomness, that is you, is being used as the seed. The whole "visionary" shtick boils down to one person just refusing to allow external ideas that pollute the identity of the world being constructed. That's it. The more consistently you say no to those ideas, the longer your world survives in its unique way. It's not that the "visionary" knows something magical that other people don't, it's just that they are stubborn because they know more ideas means the world loses its identity. Just so no to anything that is outside the bounds of the world you're building. Only you know those bounds. The clearer you define them and communicate, the easier it is for them to hold long after you're long gone.
It's not just being consistent in your color palettes, typography and logo. It goes way beyond that. I'm partial to physical products so I'll focus on that. Everything needs to be consistent and start from a set of principles as the foundation.
I'll leave you with this: not everyone needs to world-build. I don't think I would care if whoever is making toilet paper was trying to world build. Can you world build for brand that's making toilet paper? Yes, of course. Do you need to? Probably not. World building is not for everyone and everything, but if you want a brand that can survive the test of time and create a cult following, yes, you have to world-build.