When Tension Builds and Dissonance Breaks

Every brand lives between two truths: who it says it is, and who it really is. The space between those truths can create either tension or dissonance. One builds coherence. The other erodes it.

In branding, tension is rare, but powerful. Dissonance, on the other hand, is everywhere. We’ve been taught to think contradiction equals depth, but most contradictions in modern brand identity aren’t depth at all. They’re symptoms of a widening gap between expression and embodiment.

The Beauty of Honest Tension

Tension in branding is deliberate. It’s what happens when two opposing forces—values, aesthetics, or emotions—are held in honest coexistence. It’s not about playing both sides; it’s about revealing the normalcy of complexity. When handled intentionally, tension becomes magnetic. It gives a brand its pulse. It makes the brand feel human.

Few brands embody this better than Patagonia. The company sits at the intersection of anti-consumerism and commerce—a paradox most businesses would run from. Patagonia urges customers to “buy less” while selling high-quality products that last for years. It’s a billion-dollar company that actively discourages disposable consumer behavior.

That contradiction doesn’t make Patagonia hypocritical; it makes it human. The tension between profit and planet fuels the brand’s sense of purpose. It challenges both the company and its customers to confront the uneasy truth that we can’t consume our way to sustainability—but we also can’t abandon commerce altogether. That’s tension at its best: self-aware, value-driven, and creatively unresolved.

When Dissonance Masquerades as Depth

Cognitive dissonance in branding is something else entirely. It happens when a brand’s stated values don’t align with its actions—when its external message and internal culture are at odds. Unlike tension, which is intentional and integrated, dissonance is unacknowledged and corrosive.

Think of OpenAI in 2019. Founded as a nonprofit devoted to transparency and collaboration, it later restructured as a closed, competitive, for-profit entity. As journalist Karen Hao reported, the organization that once championed openness began labeling internal information as “not for sharing.”* The result wasn’t creative complexity; it was confusion and mistrust.

Dissonance erodes brand identity because it fractures credibility. It teaches audiences to expect inconsistency—to assume that what brands say and what they do will never align. And that cynicism doesn’t stay confined to one company. It seeps into culture.

The Ethical Cost of Dissonance

This isn’t just about optics or brand strategy—it’s about ethics. Dissonance normalizes dishonesty. It teaches us to see manipulation as marketing and inconsistency as innovation. When corporations claim to “empower communities” while quietly exploiting them, that’s not sophisticated branding—it’s exploitation in a prettier package.

Too often, business culture celebrates contradiction without consciousness. But sophistication without integrity is theater. The problem isn’t that brands are complex; it’s that they’re incoherent. They speak the language of progress while practicing the logic of power.

And that power, when aggregated at the top, harms the people pushed to the bottom—especially those in marginalized communities whose labor, likeness, or data are too often commodified in the name of “growth.”

Branding that Restores Coherence

If we want a better future for business and for people, we have to close the gap between expression and embodiment. That starts with how we define brand identity itself.

A brand isn’t just what it looks like or sounds like; it’s what it acts like. Authenticity is no longer a design choice—it’s a structural one. Real branding must extend beyond the surface of communication into the systems that sustain it.

Tension, when practiced with integrity, invites honesty. It holds competing truths—profit and purpose, innovation and responsibility—and asks them to coexist without canceling the other out. That’s not easy work, but it’s the work that makes a brand worth believing in.

Cognitive dissonance, however, can’t be fixed with a rebrand. It can only be resolved by changing behavior. The message has to match the mechanics. The values have to show up in decisions, not just slogans.

The Future We Could Choose

I can’t shake the conviction that business could be different—that the future of branding doesn’t have to be defined by the aggregation of power. We could build systems where power is distributed among people, not hoarded by corporations.

But that requires more than better storytelling. It requires moral imagination—the willingness to design coherence where contradiction has been the norm.

Tension builds. Dissonance breaks.

The choice between them isn’t stylistic; it’s ethical.

And it’s yours. Choose wisely.

*Karen Hao, “The Messy, Secretive Reality Behind OpenAI’s Bid to Save the World,” MIT Technology Review, February 17, 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai-moonshot-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality/