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In a glittering career Guy had raised awareness, communicated vision, evoked tangible product experiences and taken managers on inspirational visual journeys. He had reinforced leading positions and project-managed the generation of innovative retail presences. His repositioning strategies reflected the breadth and prestige of large portfolios. His communication facilitation stood out from the crowd. Engaging and impactful, for some years he had also been consistently cohesive, integrated and effective over a spread spectrum.

At the heart ofGS:TMlay a philosophy (or as Guy preferred to put it, a “way”) he had synthesized from a study of the great marketing masters. He called it “TBM,” which stood for Total Brand Mutability. During his twenties he had dabbled in the youth sector, helping the agency he worked for to develop the well-known CAR triangle, whose three corners are Cool, Attitude and Revolution. Having helped to sell an unknown quantity of sporting footwear, games consoles and snowboarding holidays to CAR-starved under-thirties in Britain and continental Europe, he had experienced what he described as a personal epiphany, the realization at a full-moon party in Thailand that his future lay in the science of “deep branding,” the great quest to harness what inGS:TMhe termed the “emotional magma that wells from the core of planet brand.” “Humans are social,” he would remind his clients in pitch meetings. “We need relationships. A brand is the perfect way to come together. Human input creates awareness and mines the brand for emotion. In a real way, the more we love it, the more powerful it gets.”

For Guy, love was the message. Love the brand and stay ahead of the curve. Much ofGS:TMwas devoted to the nature of the curve and the crucial importance of adopting a forward position in relation to it. Even so, the document’s eight hundred bullet-pointed words and Hokusai-wave intro-graphic left much unsaid about Guy Swift’s personal relationship with the future. In certain places—on moving walkways, at trade shows, in car showrooms—he felt it was physically connected to him, as if through some unexplained mechanism futurity was feeding back into his body: an alien fibrillation, a flutter of potential. Heading, say, toward the Senator Lounge at Schiphol, he would feel it coming on, a chemical lift that would grow as he checked in, blossoming into full presence as he stepped through the dimensional portal of the metal detector into the magical zone of TV monitors and international-marque goods. Surrounded by people on their way to other places, he would feel cocooned in the even light and neutral colors of a present that seemed to be declaring its own provisionality, its status as non-destination space. Then it was a time to grab things: a bottle of Absolut Citron, an open-face shrimp sandwich, a magazine. Like the objects buried with ancient kings, these items had only a temporary purpose: to help him get from where he was to where he was going, to ease his transition into the next world.

When, like Guy, you put yourself ahead of the curve, you live in the future. Literally. How else are you to understand it? It is as if you have become subject to a freak physical effect, a blurring that stretches you out beyond the trivial temporality of the unpersonalized masses of the earth. Unlike the package tourists, the mall shoppers and all the other yearners and strivers, your existence is extreme. The thrills are tremendous, but they come at a price. When Guy slept, he dreamed of tall buildings. He knew that the tiniest lapse of concentration, the smallest failure of response, could send him tumbling down toward the place of discount clothing outlets, woodchip wallpaper and economy chicken pieces. Sometimes at night his twitching took on a regular myoclonic rhythm, a constant cycle of fall and recovery. Boom and bust.