To him, truth wasn’t about reciting facts or adopting the right opinions. It was about committing to something so deeply that it reordered your life. It was messy, terrifying, and often inconvenient. But it was yours.
This was a weekend of small chores. Nothing weighty or dramatic—no room remodels or ambitious DIY projects. Just the kind of quiet tasks that sit at the edges of your mind and nibble at your peace. I needed to clean the apartment, put away the laundry, and repot a few plants. Simple things I’d been ignoring in favor of “more important” work.
I was invited on a few outings—tempting ones, too. The weather was beautiful. A cherry hat was mentioned. But I turned my friends down and said, “The truth is, I need to get this stuff done. It’s been piling up, and it’s troubling me.” And that was the truth. Despite their playful objections, those chores couldn’t wait. And no, I wouldn’t “just do them later.”
What my friends couldn’t see was that I was telling them my truth. I know myself. I know that if I let things slide too long—like washing the kitchen floor—I start to feel low. And yet I’ll keep avoiding it, convinced there are other things I’d rather be doing. Eventually, though, it catches up to me. I stop sleeping well. I can’t focus. I get stuck. So I needed to reclaim some order—not for perfection’s sake, but because that’s what lets me function at my best. And I needed to be at my best come Monday morning.
I had a meeting scheduled with a new company that wanted to talk about their brand.
That meeting was on my mind as I went about cleaning, folding, scrubbing, and repotting. As I picked up books scattered across the apartment—books I’d pulled off the shelf mid-project, hoping to grab a quote or chase down an image—I found myself slipping them back into their rightful places. And when I returned The Seducer’s Diary to its home, I paused.
Søren Kierkegaard, I thought, might understand our branding meetings better than most CMOs.
Kierkegaard, for those who skipped existential dread in college, believed that truth wasn’t something out there—it was something in here. As you’re reading this, know that I am pointing at my chest, where my heart and soul reside. You should do the same. “Truth is subjectivity,” he wrote. In other words, it’s not enough to know something; you have to live it. Commit to it. Risk something for it.
And that made me think: if truth is only real when it’s lived, what does that say about branding?
Because a lot of what we call branding is really just saying the right thing. The perfect tagline. The carefully polished mission statement. But Kierkegaard might have called that aesthetic despair—trying to appear authentic without ever actually being it.
So now I’m wondering: what if a brand’s real strength isn’t in its strategy decks, but in its existential backbone?
What Kierkegaard Meant by Personal Truth
Søren Kierkegaard didn’t set out to write marketing strategy. He set out to figure out how to live without losing his mind.
In the face of a society obsessed with reason, systems, and external answers, Kierkegaard argued that real truth—the kind that changes us—isn’t objective. It’s personal. It’s subjective. It’s lived.
To him, truth wasn’t about reciting facts or adopting the right opinions. It was about committing to something so deeply that it reordered your life. It was messy, terrifying, and often inconvenient. But it was yours.
He called this “subjective truth”—the idea that what matters most isn’t what you believe, but how you believe it. Are you living it? Risking something for it? Letting it shape your actions, even when it’s hard?
Kierkegaard had no patience for performance without passion. He saw people drifting through life saying the right things, following the crowd, trying to look put-together, while inwardly they were empty. He called this “aesthetic despair.” A life arranged for show.
Sound familiar?
We might not call it despair in branding meetings, but we know the feeling. It’s the company that says “people first” while gutting its workforce. The brand that champions sustainability in its ads, but dumps plastic in the ocean behind the scenes. The startup that talks about bold innovation while copying its competitors pixel for pixel.
That’s not strategy. That’s performance. And Kierkegaard would have seen right through it.
Because when a brand isn’t grounded in something real—something lived—it creates a disconnect. A gap between the image and the experience. And in that gap, trust falls apart.
So let’s talk about that gap. Let’s talk about branding’s current crisis of authenticity—and why Kierkegaard might be the unlikely voice we need to help close it.
Branding and the Crisis of Authenticity
For all the data, design, and deck-polishing that go into modern branding, there’s one thing audiences keep coming back to: Does this feel real? Not Does it look cool? or Did it test well in the focus group?—but Is this brand telling the truth, or just a good story?
We’re living in an age where people are exceptionally good at sniffing out inauthenticity. They’ve seen too many brand apologies crafted by PR teams, too many slick campaigns masking shaky ethics, too many claims of “purpose” that collapse under even light scrutiny. What they crave—what they need—is coherence. Consistency. Evidence that a brand’s outer voice matches its inner life.
This is the heart of Kierkegaard’s relevance. He didn’t say people needed to find some abstract universal truth. He said they needed to live their truth. With urgency. With integrity. With risk.
When brands lose touch with that, when they chase trends or water themselves down to appeal to everyone, they fall into what he would call despair. They stop being themselves. They become branding simulations—attractive, maybe, but hollow.
It’s not that brands can’t change or evolve. They should. But those changes should come from a core that’s been wrestled with and chosen. Not from marketing pressure or fear of falling behind.
And yet—how often do we see that wrestling happen? How many brands actually pause long enough to ask the harder questions? What do we stand for? What are we willing to risk for it? Where do we stop performing and start committing?
Which brings us back to Kierkegaard—and to the messy, necessary idea at the center of all this: lived truth. Let’s talk about what it actually means to live your brand, and why that’s the difference between existing and mattering.
Truth as Lived: What It Means for Brands
For Kierkegaard, living your truth wasn't a feel-good slogan—it was a full-body commitment. It required risk, sacrifice, and a kind of spiritual courage. To live subjectively was to choose a path, knowing it might cost you something. It was, in his terms, a leap of faith.
Brands don’t typically use language like that. They use words like purpose, values, and alignment—but when you strip the jargon away, what we’re really talking about is the same thing: a leap into identity. A commitment to being a certain kind of company, even when the market pulls in a different direction.
It’s easy to say a brand is “authentic.” It’s harder to prove it. Proof lives in behavior—especially under pressure. It shows up in who gets hired, what gets funded, and what gets left on the cutting room floor. It shows up in whether a company honors its values when no one’s watching—or when everyone is, and the stakes are high.
That’s what it means to live a brand. Not to decorate it. Not to announce it. But to embody it.
You can see the difference in brands that have made that leap. Patagonia’s environmental stance isn’t a seasonal campaign—it’s a throughline. They’ve sued the government, given away the company, and refused deals that would have been profitable but ethically compromised. Whether you agree with their stance or not, the truth is lived.
Same with Ben & Jerry’s. Their social justice messaging isn’t just a font choice—it’s part of their DNA. And yes, sometimes it gets messy. Living your truth often does. But it’s that very messiness—the friction of real conviction—that builds trust.
On the other hand, when a brand adopts a cause because it’s trending, or crafts values for the About page with no intention of following through, audiences feel the hollowness. We may not always have the language for it, but we sense it. It's Kierkegaard’s despair, rebranded and scaled.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: most brands are far more comfortable designing a truth than living one.
But what happens when a brand does live it? When it stops hedging and choose something real?
That’s when we start seeing strength. Not the loud, performative kind—but the kind rooted in clarity, conviction, and presence.
Let’s go a step deeper. Let’s talk about what happens when brands don’t know who they are—and why Kierkegaard would call that something far worse than indecision.
Brand Despair: The Danger of Not Knowing Who You Are
Kierkegaard had a word for the condition of not living in alignment with your own truth. He called it despair—not in the modern sense of sadness or hopelessness, but in a deeper, more existential sense: the sickness of being out of sync with your own self.
In this context, existential doesn’t mean dramatic or life-threatening. It means grounded in existence—in the choices we make, the life we live, and whether any of it matches who we really are. For Kierkegaard, despair wasn’t about feeling bad. It was about refusing to become who you’re meant to be.
That feels hauntingly familiar in the branding world.
You can see it in brands that drift—those that rebrand every few years, not because they’ve evolved, but because they never figured out who they were in the first place. They change logos, taglines, tone of voice, even values, as if trying on outfits in the dressing room of public opinion.
It’s not evolution. It’s evasion.
These brands chase competitors, trends, consultants, and markets, hoping someone out there will hand them a ready-made identity. But identity doesn’t come from the outside. It’s built from within—through choices, consistency, and the courage to let go of who you aren’t.
And the trouble with being a brand in despair is that you’re constantly broadcasting confusion. Customers don’t just notice the disconnect—they feel it. Employees feel it too. When a brand has no center, it becomes harder and harder for anyone to know what’s expected, what matters, or why they should care.
Despair, Kierkegaard said, is the refusal to become oneself. In branding terms, it’s the refusal to stand for something specific, meaningful, and lived. It’s the belief that looking like a brand is the same thing as being one.
But what if you stopped trying to look like a brand at all?
What if you stopped trying to impress and instead tried to express—something honest, something lived, something that doesn’t work for everyone but works deeply for someone?
That kind of clarity—the refusal to fake it, the courage to become it—that’s the beginning of a real brand.
And that’s where things get interesting.
Because once you understand how to raise your truth to the surface, you also begin to understand how to work with truth in others. That’s the space where leadership, storytelling, marketing, and negotiation all begin to shift—from tactics to connection.
Let’s move there now—to the art of raising and lowering truth, status, and presence. Because branding, like life, is relational. And how we live our truth affects how others respond to it.
Showing Up as a Brand
It’s one thing to define your values on a whiteboard. It’s another thing entirely to live them in the world—where things get messy, customers push back, markets shift, and your convictions are tested.
Kierkegaard’s challenge wasn’t just about discovering your truth. It was about showing up in it. Day after day. Publicly. Even when it’s inconvenient. Especially when it’s inconvenient.
For brands, this isn’t just about being consistent—it’s about being present. It's not enough to claim a belief; you have to carry it into your decisions, your communication, and your behavior. That’s where trust is built. Not in the moment you say something true, but in the moments you keep living it.
This is where branding becomes less about performance and more about presence.
Think of how some brands hold their ground. They speak up when it matters. They stay quiet when it’s not performative. They make choices that don’t always please everyone, but make sense within the truth they’ve chosen. That’s not stubbornness—it’s coherence. It’s the difference between branding as a mask and branding as a mirror.
To show up as a brand means you’ve stopped hedging. You’ve done the internal work. And now, you’re ready to move in alignment—even when no one claps. Even when it costs you something.
But showing up isn’t just about external alignment. It has to reach inward too. Leadership has to believe it. Employees have to feel it. Culture has to carry it. Because if those things fall out of sync, the public will sense it before your next campaign ever launches.
So, how do you help a brand show up like that?
You start by going back to the beginning—not the beginning of the brand, but the beginning of belief. What matters? What holds up under pressure? What story are we actually living?
These aren’t marketing questions. They’re existential ones.
And once a brand starts answering them honestly, they’re in the right position to move forward—clearly, meaningfully, and with conviction.
Let’s talk about where that kind of clarity can actually take a brand—and how to make the leap without losing yourself along the way.
Where the Leap Takes You
Kierkegaard said that living your truth requires a leap of faith—not because you have all the answers, but because you don’t. And you jump anyway. You commit to something real, something specific, even when it’s uncertain, because not committing is a kind of slow death. A brand that never leaps never lands.
That leap—for brands—might look like choosing a stance that alienates some people but deeply connects with others. It might mean refusing to follow industry norms or scaling back profits to protect a principle. It might mean saying “no” to what’s popular and “yes” to what’s true—for you.
There’s always risk in that. But there’s risk in staying still, too. Risk in dilution. Risk in becoming forgettable. And customers don’t fall in love with forgettable brands. They fall in love with bold ones. The ones that move with purpose.
This is where real resonance lives—not in trying to be universal, but in being unmistakably yourself. In Kierkegaard’s terms, it’s the difference between aesthetic existence—living for appearance—and ethical or spiritual existence—living for meaning.
It’s the same in branding. Aesthetic brands are well-packaged. Ethical brands are well-rooted. One looks good in the moment. The other lasts.
That doesn’t mean every brand needs to be loud or controversial. Not at all. It means every brand needs to be clear. Clear about what matters. Clear about who they’re for. Clear about what they will and won’t do—even when the market says otherwise.
That kind of clarity changes how you market, how you hire, and how you grow. It gives you an internal compass. And more than anything else, it builds trust. Because people know where you stand. And more importantly, they know you’re standing on something real.
Now, let’s bring this home—because there’s one more place this idea leads us: how ThoughtLab helps brands not just define themselves, but become themselves.
Becoming the Brand: A Kierkegaardian Summing-Up
So yes—I spent the weekend scrubbing my kitchen floor and putting The Seducer’s Diary back on the shelf. But that quiet act of reclaiming my space turned into something else: a kind of existential realignment. Not dramatic, not epiphanic—just truthful. And truth, as Kierkegaard reminds us, doesn’t have to be loud to matter. It just has to be lived.
The same goes for branding. In a world obsessed with performance and polish, the brands that resonate aren’t the ones with the flashiest decks or the most expensive slogans. They’re the ones with an existential backbone—a clear sense of who they are, what they value, and how they live that out even when no one’s watching.
That’s not just strategy. That’s identity.
At ThoughtLab, we help brands do that deeper work. Yes, we create beautiful, smart, effective brand systems—but underneath all of it, we’re asking bigger questions:
What do you believe in?
What do you stand for?
What truth are you willing to commit to—even when it’s hard?
Because branding isn’t just about what you look like. It’s about what you live like.
And in the end, that’s the only truth that really sticks.
