KGS helps startups, corporations and other organisations to design authentic, meaningful and relevant brands.

• Brands customers and employees can use to construct and perform their personal identity.

• Brands that are crafted with skill and care across all touchpoints.

• Brands with an unique market position and identity.

• Brands designed to accumulate cultural authority, capital and influence over time.

KGS employs the Construct™ brand building framework developed by Karl Grøndal.

To learn more get in touch or sign-up for the course Brand Building.

Branding theory and practice are often based on the notion that brands should somehow emulate human traits and behaviour. However, unscientific metaphors such as “personality” or “DNA” detach brand strategy from culture, history, and ultimately, reality. Building your brand on a foundation of unsubstantiated theory distorts the scope of creative possibilities and increases the risk of misguided strategic trajectories.

Brands are not coded with anthropomorphic DNA, but are built from cultural materials, signifiers, and themes. Brands are, in the words of French semiologist Raphaël Lellouche, “transmedia cultural entities.” Brand is a cultural category. Branding is—or should be—the strategic creation of culture.

Brands evolve, like any other cultural entity, from an ideological belief system expressed creatively through inspiring mythologies, meaningful rituals, symbolic artifacts, and distinct sites. Brands should therefore be conceptualized, designed, and strategized as such.

For the customer:

In our post-modern hyperculture, personal and social identity is no longer inherited or divinely ordained but an individual and ongoing project of creating oneself. In this process, brands are essential building blocks.

“From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.” - Michel Foucault.

When the brand audience can mirror their core values and ideologies in the brand, when their dreams are woven into the brand’s mythologies, and when the brand’s products become part of their personal aesthetics and communal rituals - a deep sense of belonging is created.

For the brand owner:

A meaningful and relevant brand converts to costumer loyalty and brand equity in the marketplace.

An influential brand will build cultural capital, authority and influence over time. This can give the brand a status of cultural innovator and originator, a position that can pay dividends for decades, think: Levi’s 501, Disney’s early films like Snow White, Bang & Olufsen’s innovative design language from the 70s or Ferrari’s racing heritage.