Where the Brand Kinesphere comes from.

Sam Fowler is Chief Strategy Officer at Craft Media London.

He created the Brand Kinesphere after being asked to prepare a talk on what he thought the most important considerations for brands heading into 2027 were. He chose to focus on Body Language.

His argument in this talk and a belief he fiercely guards is that many businesses and brands have forgotten to consider how their brand should move through the world. As a result many comms plans he comes across are interchangable between themselves and their competitors.

So why a Kinesphere?

Talking about Body Language in isolation can sometimes lead to a misalignment between what the comms are doing and what the DNA of the business is (or where it wants to be). Therefore Sam sought to align the Brand Archetype Wheel, with Rudolf Labans Theory of Movement.

This model on model concept isn't perfect, but it is a new step in finding ways to establish more effective planning.

The long-term ambition for the Brand Kinesphere is to help remove silo'd thinking across teams and agencies, whilst provoking more interesting diverse hypothesis for how we can use channels, technology and creativity in modern effective communications planning.

Rudolf Laban was a dancer, choreographer and theorist, born in Pozsony in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Bratislava. Working in Munich, Zurich and at the artists’ colony of Monte Verità in Switzerland in the years around the First World War, and then across Germany in the 1920s, he set out to understand movement as rigorously as music is understood: as something with a structure that could be analysed, taught and written down. The notation system he published in 1928, now known as Labanotation, is still used to record choreography today.

At the centre of his thinking was the kinesphere: the sphere of space around a body that its limbs can reach without taking a step, and which travels with that body wherever it goes. Within it, Laban described how every movement varies in its effort, across weight (strong or light), time (sudden or sustained), space (direct or indirect) and flow (bound or free). After his work was suppressed by the Nazi regime, he settled in England in 1938 and applied these ideas to factory work with the industrial consultant F.C. Lawrence, studying how people could move with less strain and more purpose. Their book Effort (1947) set out the eight basic effort actions, from punch to float, that sit at the heart of this tool. His work continues in Laban Movement Analysis, and in Trinity Laban, the London conservatoire that carries his name.

It was a theory of how people work before it was a theory of dance, which is why it translates so naturally to how brands behave.

The idea of archetypes comes from the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who argued in the early twentieth century that certain characters and patterns, such as the hero, the trickster and the wise old man, recur across myths and cultures because they reflect shared structures in the human mind. In 2001, Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson brought those ideas to marketing in The Hero and the Outlaw, describing twelve archetypes that brands can embody and grouping them around four basic human motivations: stability and control, belonging, mastery, and independence. The circular wheel that now appears in planning decks everywhere grew out of their framework.

The wheel’s value has never been precision. Its value is that it forces a choice about who a brand is, and gives a team a shared way to talk about character. The Brand Kinesphere keeps the wheel at its centre and adds the question it leaves open: once you know who a brand is, how does it move?

Anti Ultra-Processed Planning is a cookbook for communications strategy from Craft Media London. Its argument is that planning has become ultra-processed: mass-produced by platforms and automated tools, and in danger of forgetting the human fundamentals of insight, cultural understanding and creative judgement. Across eight recipes, it sets out practical methods that work in any channel, and makes the case that technology is most powerful when it is used alongside human thinking rather than instead of it.

The Brand Kinesphere grew out of two of those recipes. Brands Need Body Language argues that how a brand moves through the world matters as much as what it says, and begins by asking planners to choose an archetype. Plan Through Culture, Not Channels, written with AnalogFolk, introduces the Cultural Cascade, the four layers of culture from Mainstream to Tribe that shape the Creator edition.

• R. Laban & F.C. Lawrence, Effort (1947).
• R. Laban, The Mastery of Movement on the Stage (1950).
• R. Laban, Choreutics, edited by Lisa Ullmann (1966).
• C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works vol. 9, part 1.
• M. Mark & C.S. Pearson, The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes (2001).
• Craft Media London, Anti Ultra-Processed Planning: The human made guide to effective comms strategy (2026).

The Brand Kinesphere draws on the work credited on this page. It is an interpretation of that work and is not endorsed by, or affiliated with, its authors or their estates.