There is a particular type of meeting that happens inside companies, it is called a brand workshop.
Someone has been hired to facilitate it.
There are Post-it notes.
There are questions like “if your brand were a person, what kind of car would it drive?”
The room fills with a quiet collective performance.
Managers say things they believe sound right.
Words like genuine and human are written on a whiteboard.
Nobody mentions the lawsuit from 2019.
Nobody mentions the layoffs.
Nobody mentions the CEO’s remarks that had to be walked back.
The brand that emerges from that room is not a company, it is a persona.
Jung called the parts of the psyche we refuse to acknowledge the shadow.
Not the evil parts, necessarily, the inconvenient ones.
The contradictions.
The history that doesn’t fit the story we prefer to tell.
Individuals spend enormous energy keeping their shadow out of the room, so do companies.
The brand deck is, among other things, a shadow-management device.
The problem is what Goffman already knew about performance, it only works while the audience cooperates.
The moment someone stops playing along, the whole architecture becomes visible.
You don’t see the brand, you see the effort to maintain the brand, and that gap, between the performance and what the performance is covering, is exactly where trust collapses.
Every brand that has ever announced it was “committed to authenticity” has already lost the argument.
You cannot commit to authenticity, the announcement is the problem.
Authenticity is what remains after you stop deciding what to show.
A company that is actually what it says it is does not need a workshop to find that out.
Baudrillard’s more uncomfortable observation is that we no longer have originals, only copies of copies.
Most brand strategy, if you trace it back far enough, is a company mimicking what it believes a trustworthy company looks like.
Not being trustworthy, resembling it.
The referent has been lost.
The market is populated by simulations of credibility.
I worked in branding long enough to watch this process from the inside.
What I found is that the most legible brands are not the most polished ones.
They are the ones where the shadow was allowed into the room.
Where someone said, “we don’t actually believe that, so let’s not write it.”
Where the history was treated as a feature rather than a liability to be managed.
The companies that endure are usually the ones that stopped trying to control the impression and started trying to be worth the impression they were making.
That is not a rebrand, it is a different thing.
The curated self, in people, tends to calcify.
The more energy spent on maintenance, the more brittle the structure becomes.
One unexpected question and the whole thing cracks.
Brands work the same way.
A strategy built on managed perception has to keep managing.
It requires constant updating, constant monitoring, constant correction, it is expensive, and fragile in ways that matter at the worst moments.
The shadow does not disappear because it was excluded from the brand guidelines.
It waits.
I Can See You
