About KGS
KGS is a network-based brand and design consultancy founded by Karl Grøndal.
Karl Grøndal has a MA in Architecture and Design from The Royal Danish Academy and 30 years of experience across a wide range of projects, working as a consultant, educator and entrepreneur in Denmark, India, China and Japan.
KGS client projects are developed with the clients in-house team or with a custom team created from the KGS network of skilled and specialized architects, designers, artists, engineers, developers, strategists and craftsmen.
The Construct brand building framework is developed by Karl Grøndal ©2025
This site is designed by KGS and developed by Casper Bisgaard. To buy as template get in touch.
For Karl Grøndal’s photography work:
Services
Brand
Brand audit
Brand beliefs
Core narratives
Creative direction
Brand strategy
Design
Future concepts
Visual design
Internal and external rituals
Digital products and interfaces
Industrial products
Spatial brand experiences
Brand design systems
Strategic advice
Sparring with founders and leadership teams on strategic objectives from a brand and design perspective.
Workshops
Brand Building
Iconic Design
(The workshops can be tailored for an academic or a corporate setting).
Selected client projects
Internal brand project for Novo Nordisk, Japan
(with Synean)
Brand identity and app design for the startup Foam
(co-founder)
Brand identity and app design for the startup Recs (co-founder)
Industrial design projects for Godrej, India
(with Onio)
Corporate design strategy for Grundfos
(with CBD)
Industrial design projects for Jabra
(with CBD)
Retail design for Danske Bank
(with Kontrapunkt)
Industrial design projects for JCDecaux
(with Knud Holscher Industriel Design)
Industrial design for Principia
(with professor Anders Brix)
Academia
Teaching brand and design theory at BJFU, Beijing
Lecture on iconic design at the Royal Danish Academy
Pre-doc at The Danish Center for Design Research (unfinished)
Teaching the International Design Semester at the Danish Technical University
Lecture on brand building at the Copenhagen Business School
Contact
Branding is strategic culture creation - a manifesto
Branding theory and practice are often based on the notion that brands should somehow emulate human traits and behavior. 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.
“Hyperculturality de-facticizes, de-materializes, de-naturalizes and de-sites the world.” - Byung-Chul Han
The flaws in our fundamental ideologies that lead to ecological disasters, failing social cohesion, and a declining existential sense of meaning will be difficult to fix from outside the capitalist system; it needs to be an inside job.
Capitalism is (as culture) a shared fiction and is therefore inherently flexible and can be molded to our needs. We need to radically rethink and redefine what we consider desirable and valuable.
Reevaluate and replace the beliefs and narratives we live by to create a world where we coexist in greater harmony with the environment and ourselves. The way we live today is not only depleting nature but also our psyche.
French philosopher Bernard Stiegler professed that we, as consumers, have been “discharged” of the burden and responsibility of shaping our own lives—and thus reduced to units of buying power controlled by marketing techniques. He argued that we have lost the “knowledge-how-to-live” (savoir-vivre) and have ultimately been deprived of the joy of life (joie de vivre). In a world shaped increasingly by artificial intelligence, this is only becoming more true.
Brands have progressive and transformative potential. Ambitious brands can be Trojan horses for societal change. Brands should move beyond simply reproducing existing cultural tropes and instead become experimental labs, authoring innovative ideologies, rituals, artifacts, and sites. Brands should become generators of an ever-expanding global cultural diversity. They should propose alternative visions for our future ideological, ecological, social, and material reality. Brands need to be part of the solution for our collective future—driving the cultural vanguard and re-enchanting the world. That said, brands can also stay relevant and meaningful to their audience by serving a conservative purpose: upholding traditional values, protecting brand heritage, or preserving a craft.
“When desire is treated industrially, it leads to the destruction of desire.” - Bernard Stiegler
Brands should not only do this for the common good but also out of a motive of self-preservation. Consumerism is driven by desire at its core. Consumers need to be engaged to feel desire. Passive, homogenized, mindless consumerism will implode under its own weight of meaningless irrelevance. Doomscrolling—the default mode of consumerism today—is a conveyor belt for our minds, leading straight to numb passivity and bland conformity.
The most relevant brands are—and will increasingly be—the ones able to co-create culture in the most creative, authentic, and meaningful ways. Brands that are empathetic to people’s desires and anxieties. Brands that understand, facilitate, and evolve people’s identity projects. Brands that build real communities. Brands with ambitions to shape and evolve societal discourse.
Brands should help people find meaning and build identity by becoming trustworthy authorities—recognizing and guiding their audiences by offering:
- Relevant and meaningful belief systems
- Inspiring myths to escape into and aspire to
- Beautiful artifacts to express identity and signify group affiliation
- Magical rituals to enable the enactment of beliefs
- Shared spaces for community and belonging
In our commercialized and secularized cultures, I believe brands can play an active role in giving renewed meaning to our lives. We are, as a society, meaning-starved. Most existing rituals are empty—devoid of symbolic and mythological significance. This is a trend that has evolved gradually since the Nietzschean deicide and culminated by the end of the 20th century in the dissolution of all meta-narratives, in the Lyotardian sense.
We now live in the eternal Groundhog Day of hyperculture—where everything is consumed and regurgitated in endless cycles of sameness; where political intensity and stagnation paradoxically coexist; and where cultural superficiality has become pervasive, suffocating, and stealthily internalized.
“What we make stands testament to who we are.” - Jony Ive
It’s time to reframe and reinvent the future. We need new, inspirational, and humane ideologies to address the challenges we face as a global society and as a species. The fundamentally nihilistic ideologies and mechanistic doctrines that guide every part of our lives—our current capitalist meta-belief system—do not provide that, but only deepen the need.
The most significant brands are embedded in our collective consciousness—ingrained in the cultural fabric, shaping our fluid, flattened, and fragmented world. By building culture, brands tap into the human psyche on a fundamental level. This is a highly advantageous position, as a meaningful and relevant brand is a valuable brand. If a brand loses relevance and meaning to its core audience, it’s on a fast track to becoming worthless.
The company might still sell products based on legacy, price, or a sort of monopoly—but if nobody really cares whether the brand exists, the day a more meaningful and relevant competitor enters the marketplace, the incumbent will lose. Customers will gladly pay a premium to switch.
To learn how authentic, meaningful, and relevant brands are built, sign up for my course on Brand Building (coming soon).
To join and support my ongoing journey into a deeper understanding of culture, brands, and design, become part of my Substack community: Brand Building by Design.
I’m always interested in working with ambitious clients. If you need help developing your brand or products - get in touch.