Why some brands become folklore (and most don’t)
The moment you stop explaining and the crowd starts singing
In August 1846, a clerk at the British House of Lords wrote a letter to a magazine. He signed it with a pseudonym — Ambrose Merton — the way you throw something into the air without knowing if it will come back.
In that letter, he coined a word: folklore. Not to describe something new. To name something that had always existed but no one had known how to call.
William John Thoms was not a revolutionary. He was a civil servant with lateral curiosity and enough instinct to understand that certain things don’t come from the top down.
They come from the people. They travel quietly, generation to generation, with no author, no manual, no brand deck. And one day, without anyone deciding it, they belong to everyone.
That is folklore. And that — though no one calls it this — is also what a brand does when it truly works.
Today, folklore often takes the shape of a meme.
No one knows who made the first one. No one knows exactly when it stopped being an image with text and became shared language. But at some point you realize that you and a stranger are making the same reference, with the same cadence, and you both know exactly what it means.
That is not virality. Virality is an event. Folklore is sedimentation.
The difference matters. A brand can buy virality. It cannot buy sedimentation. Sedimentation happens when something carries enough truth inside it that people adopt it, transform it, pass it on — without being asked and without being managed.
Thoms sensed this without knowing it. He wanted to preserve what was born from the people before industrialization erased it. Today the threat is not the steam engine. It is top-down branding. Declared identity. A narrative designed in a boardroom and launched into the market hoping it will stick.
It doesn’t stick. Or it sticks wrong. It sticks like advertising, not like truth.
An anthem without lyrics is a brand without a voice.
I recently attended a book presentation about how the anthem of Asturias was born. How it was woven slowly, experimenting with forms, until it became something people feel is theirs without ever having decided to feel it. That is an anthem. Not a declaration. An accumulation.
But the author said something that stayed with me: an anthem without lyrics is not an anthem.
Spain has one of the most recognizable anthems in the world. And it has no lyrics. Everyone hums it at the Olympics, at the World Cup, in the moments when a nation is supposed to recognize itself. No one sings it. Because there is nothing to sing.
Identity without voice. Territory without language. An orphan melody.
And brands do exactly the same thing. They build visual. They build aesthetic. They build presence. And they leave language for later. Or for never. As if words were the last step and not the first. As if naming things mattered less than making them pretty.
The lyrics are not the ornament of the anthem. They are what make it transmissible. What people can repeat, claim, make their own. Without lyrics, the anthem belongs to everyone in the abstract and to no one in particular. Without language, the brand exists but cannot spread.
Everyone pushes top-down. Folklore climbs.
Traditional branding works in one direction: top-down. The brand decides who it is, declares it, distributes it, waits for the market to receive it. It is the model of the decree. The mandate. The press release.
And it works. Until it doesn’t.
It works as long as you have enough budget to repeat the message until it lands. It works as long as your audience has no voice of its own. It works as long as the channel is one-way and you control the loudspeaker.
But folklore never worked like that. The anthem of Asturias was not born in a committee. The meme was not born in a creative department. The word folklore was not born in an academy — it was born in an anonymous letter in a literary magazine, signed with a false name, launched without knowing if anyone would pick it up.
Everyone picked it up.
A brand becomes folklore when it stops explaining itself.
There is a moment when brands that truly work stop needing introductions. Not because they are famous. But because something about what they are — a phrase, an image, a way of saying things — has entered circulation without anyone pushing it.
That moment is not designed. It is built.
It is built by knowing where you operate from before anyone asks. It is built with language that carries enough truth inside it for others to adopt it, repeat it, make it theirs without asking permission.
It is built on a mattress melody — identity, territory, archetype — on which copy can rest and become transmissible.
Without the mattress, el colchón, copy floats. It sounds but it does not resonate. It is heard but it does not stay.
Thoms understood that folklore needs time to permeate. That it is not declared — it sediments. That an oral tradition takes generations to become something that feels collective.
We don’t have generations. But the principle is the same.
The brands that become inevitable are not the ones that shout loudest from the top. They are the ones that build something with enough truth inside it that people carry it with them. Repeat it. Pass it on.
Like an anthem everyone hums without remembering when they learned it. Like a meme everyone understands without anyone having explained it. Like a word invented by an anonymous librarian in 1846 that the whole world speaks today.
Folklore is not decreed or declared. It simply spreads.
