Recently, I wrote about Lululemon as it struggles with a massive disruption.

Disruptions are very like dragons. They appear out of nowhere. They consume our marketplace. They leave us in flames, then ashes. In the Lululemon case, they bring the mighty low.

So it’s very bad news for branders that dragon proofing is so hard to do.

Part of the problem is that the legacy brand is the captive of its success. If a brand has done as well as Lululemon, it is inclined to think that it owns the category. And in the case of Lululemon, this isn’t wrong. Lululemon helped createthe category. Athleisure exists to some extent because of a little company started by Chip Wilson in Vancouver in 1998.

Lululemon and other legacy brands can’t help feeling fireproof. Sure there are little indie brands out there that would like to stage an attack. But, hey, they’re little. Large competitors threaten as well, but it’s easy to dismiss them as “never really a serious threat to us because like we are Lululemon.”

Denial

This is a way of saying that the first reaction of most legacy brands, when faced with disruption, is straight out of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross stages of grief. It’s denial. “This disruption is not happening. Not really. It will go away. Just watch.”

Eventually, the brand cycles through all the other stages identified by Kubler-Ross: anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The bargaining stage is especially tragic. In this case, the legacy brand confronts the disruptor by imitating it.

This is like going down to the basement and shoveling brand equity into a blast furnace. The consumer looks at the once mighty brand now doing an imitation of the disruptor and says, “Oh, well, that’s the end of them. And I used to like them.”

As the ever-brilliant Scott Miller likes to say, the disruptor has come bearing a new idea. It dislodges the very concept of what value and utility are. It changes the rules of perception too. But when someone else imitates the new idea, well that’s just sad. What, no new ideas of your own? The imitator suddenly looks all “too little, too late, been there, done that, oh not this again.”

Happily we can fireproof the legacy brand.

Brand of brands

I call it the “brand of brands” strategy. In this case, the brand prepares for disruption by turning itself into something with new depths and richness.

In the era of mass marketing (now thankfully passed), it was customary to insist that brands must be simple, singular things. Designers were sent through the corporation to police this simplicity, to root out the gremlins of disorder that might make the brand blurry or confusing. Keep it simple. Keep it clear. Make it obvious. Rinse. Repeat. A lot.

But the brand of brandsstrategy calls for a different approach.

It calls a brand that plays host to multiplicity, that seeks evolution, that can exploit contradiction, stage experimentation and engage with playfulness.

As a brand of brands, the legacy brand is now an infrastructure, a platform, a staging area for alternate versions of itself.

No mere mischief, this!

Now this is not mere mischief. Some branders prize creativity for the sake of creativity. But the brand of brands prizes its approach for the sake of adaptation.

This is where complex adaptive theory comes in.

I once heard Maria Souza talk about pond biology. She told a rapt audience that any time she investigates a pond that consists of one kind of life, it makes her nervous. This, she said, is what ponds look like at the end of their lives. A healthy pond is teeming with life.

Brands too. Ponds and brands survive and flourish when they contain multitudes. Especially in their moment of crisis. When challenged, the pond and the brand can rummage around in their internal diversity (so to speak) and can find something within to answer the challenge without. They have an adaptation to answer disruption.

The brand of brands uses its richness to build up a war chest, a set of new reflexes, impulses and alternatives. It does this by conducting an internal conversation, thinking through various versions of itself, inventing scenarios of what it might look like “if things go south,” creating ideas of what to do when disruption comes.

This is an internal conversation that happens also to be very public

The brand is now alive, creative, interested in a variety of things. It is canvassing the world for possibilities, real and possible. It is surveying futures. It is doing this out loud. It wants the consumer to see what it’s thinking. And to pitch in with ideas of their own.

When disruption comes, the brand is ready. The war chest is brimming. And the consumer is accustomed to this kind of thing, because he or she has been listening in and playing along.

This is how the brand of brand pays off. It creates precedent. It fashions a license. No sooner does the pond change, than the brand is ready to go, to begin again.

Dragons, they’re everywhere. The legacy brand that enters this violent world without a brand of brands is asking for trouble. The response must begin with a truthful recognition of the power of the challenger. As painful as that must be. Then the corporation must root out all the assumptions and practices that brought it to glory. And now it’s time to reinvent-not de novo, not from scratch, but out of the great treasure chest of creativity the consumer, and the competitor, knows it has.

It’s time now for the legacy brand to unleash a dragon of its own.

Grant McCracken is a cultural anthropologist who looks at the deep meanings concealed in cultural trends and consumer behavior. He uses a lifetime of study to detect these emerging cultural signals and solve wicked business challenges.