Did you know that in the 1990s, David Bowie co-developed the Verbasizer, a Mac app for writing lyrics? He would enter numerous phrases, and the program would randomly select different words, such as verbs and nouns, from those sentences. This random colliding software would inspire David Bowie’s lyrics—an approach anybody can employ.
Modern branders and marketers must learn to serve two masters at once: brands and the planet. An unexpected link exists between the emergence of green marketing methods and the rise of ancient polytheistic religions. In these early religious systems, a sky god was formed as the world’s creator, but people eventually abandoned this deity in favour of everyday worship of more mundane events.
Could a similar shift be taking place in sustainability communication?
Experiments show that the greater the diversity between conceptions, the higher the likelihood of originality. This is true for Adomas Pūras, a director and co-founder of Black Florence, a Lithuania-based branding firm. Thought leaders in branding and marketing, like Marty Neumeier, hailed his recent epiphany in hierophanic marketing.
Rethinking Abstract Environmentalism
In his 1957 book The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), possibly the most groundbreaking religious historian of the twentieth century, explains why sky gods emerged and collapsed. Celestial deities, or monarchs of their various pantheons, include Maori Iho, Babylonian Anu, Andamanese Puluga, the more well-known Greek Zeus, and Roman Jupiter. As humans attempted to relate to the world around them, the sky looked endless, transcendent, and very distinct from their surroundings. That’s where the sky god lives, and everything must be his handiwork.
While the cults of Zeus and Jupiter grew and remained significant, these sky gods would gradually fade from common religious practice in most nations. As people became increasingly interested in everything life offered (the beauty and fruits of nature, the unbreakable strength of stones, the secrets of sexuality, and the cycle of life and death), their religious experiences grew more intimate and intense. If we may find consolation in a wine god who makes us laugh after a difficult day or seek counsel from a hunting god, why would we worship a remote, unrelatable, and fairly generic sky deity?
Strangely, we aren’t that different from our forefathers in this aspect. This explains why ‘sky god strategies’ in green marketing and sustainability-focused purpose branding are frequently ineffective. We’ve all heard the preachy script: brands lecture us about the Earth and its problems (global warming, pollution, dwindling biodiversity) before listing their annual ‘sacrifices’ (reducing emissions, planting trees, recycling) to respect it. Like a faraway sky deity, these environmental messages are too vague and ethereal to be excited about.
To understand the alternative strategy, we must first dissect another concept Eliade and other scholars used: Hierophany.
What is Hierophanic Marketing?
According to Adomas Pūras, Hierophanic marketing is based on the concept of hierophany, which historians of archaic religions like Mircea Eliade popularised. In his theory, hierophanies (from Greek hiero-, “sacred,” and phainein, “to show”) are manifestations of the sacred, cosmic interventions into our chaotic space.
Hierophanies can be regarded as hidden connections between the profane and sacred existence. People in ancient pagan civilisations saw the majority of their surroundings—what we now call objective reality—as Chaos, a random, unfair, and cruel universe, a profane domain devoid of significance. And because it was meaningless, this chaotic universe was not deemed absolute! What was real, however, was the Cosmos, a parallel supernatural universe that was orderly, everlasting, flawless, or, in a word, sacred. Hierophanies transformed our planet into something amazing and magnificent, not just acceptable. These manifestations of the divine allowed people to interact with and engage in a supernatural and genuinely real universe (Cosmos).
Anything could be a hierophany: a tree, an animal, a stone, a star, a sexual encounter, or a meal. Every hierophany results from a “mysterious act – the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural profane world”.
Sacred Things You Can See and Touch
Eliade was primarily invested in comprehending (rather than condemning) the worldview of ancient people practising archaic faiths. This worldview, he contended, was moulded by two distinct modes of being: profane and sacred.
Of course, the challenge with Cosmos was that it was difficult to reach—but not impossible! What was so spectacular and fascinating about their otherwise poor everyday reality
was the existence of hidden connections between these two very different realities, Cosmos and Chaos.
That is the duality of all hierophanies. A sacred rain stone, for example, is still a stone, but it is revered because it is also more than that; it is a manifestation of a sacred force capable of summoning rain onto anybody who touches it. People in primitive civilisations would want to escape their profane existence and strengthen themselves by living as close to hierophanies as possible. According to Eliade, this would allow them “to be, to participate in [otherworldly] reality, to be saturated with power”.
One example demonstrates the significance of hierophanies in the life of the ancients. According to Eliade, the Achilpa, a nomadic Australian tribe, revered a single wooden pole as their most precious hierophany. The Achilpa universe was thought to have been created (or cosmicized) by a celestial entity named Numbakula. After that, he built a wooden pole called kauwa-auwa, which he used to climb into the sky.
Because they still possessed the kauwa-auwa, they felt safe, real, and alive. Although they were surrounded by Chaos, theirs was a holy area and civilization. When the Achilpa journeyed outside their region, they carried the pole with them and followed the direction in which it bent. Travelling is considerably more enjoyable if you are always following a spiritual path!
The High-Stakes World of Brand Strategists
In archaic cultures, the smartest and most perceptive individuals – spiritual leaders – were responsible for interpreting hierophanies and directing people between the holy and profane. Today, brand strategists and marketers can and should embrace this coveted high-stakes profession since no one else is positioned or possesses the requisite competence to substantially impact how people perceive the things around them in their everyday lives.
In their 2023 book Sustainable Marketing: The Industry’s Role in a Sustainable Future, Paul Randle and Alexis Eyre write that “we have the power to help change behaviours in a way that much of the scientific data generated by our well-intentioned scientists has not.”
It may be loosely characterised as a method for implementing the ‘ modern holy’ sustainability concepts in everyday products and services. Such manifestations empower individuals to be more proactive in building a sustainable environment while allowing businesses to increase brand value.
To be impactful in their green campaigns, brands should move beyond sky-god strategies towards hierophanic ones. In fact, some have already done so.
Ikea’s ‘Climate Action Station’ Campaign
Consider IKEA’s “Climate Action Station” initiative. It invites families with children to play with IKEA packaging and create “climate symbols” such as elephants, plants, and wind turbines. Instead of throwing away cardboard and other packaging waste, families use IKEA’s precise instructions to create lovely cardboard toys while discussing climate change. IKEA also urges parents to ask their children to engage in magical thinking throughout the creation process, asking, “What would they like their symbol to tell their parents, teachers, and politicians?”
These cardboard-made elephants, flowers, and wind turbines are modern hierophanies. They are instances of the ‘modern holy’ idea of recycling profane materials, namely packaging trash. The IKEA ritual, like the old Indian ritual, may convert any
house into a ‘modern holy’ area – a “climate action station.” These entertaining hierophanies enable children and families to make a practical difference, learn more about climate change, and actively turn chaos (planet-threatening garbage) into meaning (climate symbols).
Renault’s “Plug Inn” Campaign
Take Renault’s 2023 “Plug Inn” campaign, for example. Renault, France’s leader in electric automobiles, encountered a problem: Urban owners of these cars could not travel freely and comfortably around France due to a lack of public charging points in rural areas. Renault’s revolutionary “Airbnb for Plugs” project now allows vehicles to access a network of private home chargers rented by rural residents. First and foremost, it addresses a practical issue. However, these home chargers might equally be seen as secular epiphanies.
According to Eliade, “The sacred tree and the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, and they show something that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred.” Similarly, home chargers represent an idea that has become ‘sacred’ in our modern societies: electric transition. Just like the Achilpa people would only enter the Chaos with their pole, most Renault drivers would not dare to leave their precious electrified zones to explore the rural unknown. Renault cosmicized elements of the universe previously perceived as chaotic and unrelated to the ‘new progressive reality’ by brand ‘believers’.
It is surprising (hopefully refreshing) to see how our ancient and current instances of hierophanies differ from the strict way sanctity is generally interpreted and depicted. Hierophanies are fun, engaging, powerful, and down-to-earth. The ancients shared our inclination. This is what Eliade had to say in his Comparative Patterns in Religion (1958): “What is obvious is that the ultimate sky deity always gives way to other religious forms. It is a shift from the transcendence and passivity of sky spirits towards more dynamic, active, and immediately accessible forms [such as] mana, orenda, wakan, animism, totemism.”
Archaic beliefs dismissed superior deities (typically sky gods) as dei otiosi, or gods who created the world but then retired and disappeared. People have no reason to worship or sacrifice to this passive and distant god. As a result, they preferred to focus their spiritual attention on hierophanies, which were concrete and inclusive expressions of the divine that they could find in their everyday lives.
Whether we innovate in marketing or not, as American record producer Rick Rubin argues, “We are what we consume.k” Thus, the quality of the stuff we watch, read, and listen to is paramount.
Author: Amar Chowdhury
