Ambidextrous Branding | Aligning Purpose, Business and Brand in a Living System

What do we call Ambidextrous Branding?

Let’s start with the basics. No, it’s not about juggling with both hands, although that would be quite the metaphor. It’s about a new kind of dexterity:

Ambidextrous Branding is the ability of a brand to remain firmly anchored in its identity and core values while fluidly responding to change, innovation, and disruption.

It’s the strategic capability of a brand to operate with both consistency and flexibility. It honours its foundational identity, long-term mission, and institutional values while adapting with responsiveness to evolving customer expectations, cultural shifts, and market turbulence. Think of it as being rooted like an oak tree yet swaying like bamboo in the storm.

This branding paradigm draws inspiration from ambidextrous organisations, those capable of exploiting current strengths while exploring new skills. Brands that adopt this dual posture remain coherent without rigidity, innovative without losing clarity. They stay strategically focused while being tactically adaptive.

Ambidextrous Branding is ultimately a mindset and methodological framework that embraces complexity, cultivates learning, and translates ambiguity into opportunity. It is the brand’s way of staying alive and leading in a crazy world that, for better or worse, we are building.

The Conceptual Triad | Purpose, Business Strategy, Brand Strategy

To create a living, breathing brand that can operate ambidextrously, organisations must deeply align three core pillars:

• Purpose: This is not a marketing gimmick or a slogan on a wall. Purpose is the existential reason a company exists I would add founding principles and values, but I don’t want to complicate things either. It speaks to the meaningful impact it aspires to make on the world – its permanent footprint. A powerful purpose is socially rooted, forward-facing, and timeless -remember that changing purpose is creating a new entity. It is company definition which elevates business strategic goals into broader human relevance. Purpose becomes the North Star that guides the organisation through complexity, anchoring its choices in something enduring and socially valued.
• Business Strategy: This pillar, arising from the above, represents how the business competes, grows, and sustains value in its markets. It translates the lofty imprint of purpose into executive strategic definitions, which in turn become actionable goals and resource allocation. Business strategy defines the logic behind organisational success, including choices about key stakeholders, markets, capabilities, business models, and metrics. It transforms why the company exists into how it will succeed.
• Brand Strategy: Often misunderstood as being subordinate to marketing, brand strategy is, in fact, the bridge between the company’s business strategy and the emotional world of its stakeholders. It defines the promise the company and its business make through its brands, the identity it projects, the personality it assumes, and builds the story it invites others to be part of. Brand strategy turns the internal logic of the business into external relevance and resonance.

Together, these three pillars form a company conceptual ecosystem. When purpose, business strategy and brand strategy are misaligned, dissonance arises. When they are integrated, clarity, coherence and growth follow.

Living Systems | Why Brands Must Breathe

Brands today are not static constructs. In an age marked by constant disruption – as all the previous ones that humanity has experienced, global uncertainty and cultural acceleration, brands must evolve from fixed structures into living systems. These systems are not controlled from the top down, they are shaped by the interactions between people, technology, meaning and experience.

Living brands:

• Adapt quickly to shifts in markets, values, and behaviours. They continuously interpret data, trends and context to reconfigure how they show up in the world.
• Learn from their customers, employees, and ecosystems. They don’t assume authority; they listen and co-create.
• Grow organically, expanding through relationships, real stories, participation, and moments of truth.

A living brand is never finished. It is constantly “becoming” -in Beta mode-, and this process requires agility, humility and strategic clarity.

Ambidextrous brands don’t just transmit identity; they negotiate it with their audiences in real time. They lead not through perfection, but through relevance and responsiveness.

Symbology, Story-Building, and Participatory Practices

To become culturally resonant, brands need more than rational strategy, they need emotional and symbolic expression. Adapted from Ted Matthews‘ approach to service design., ambidextrous brands achieve this through three interlinked cultural mechanisms:

• Symbology: Brands communicate much of their meaning not only through words but through signs and symbols. Symbology creates instant recognition and emotional response. The semiotics of a brand convey its worldview, style and intention, often more powerfully than messaging alone.
• Story-Building: Unlike storytelling, where the company constructs and narrates a polished tale, story-building is an open, participatory process -as I once heard from a good colleague, Phillipe Mihailovich. It invites key audiences -customers, employees, other key stakeholders- to co-create meaning through lived experiences. In story-building, the brand becomes a platform for collective narratives, shared memory, and cultural authorship. It is about opening the plot, not closing it.
• Participatory Practices: These are the touchpoints and engagements that foster emotional connection and reinforce brand values. They might be user rituals -like how one opens a package-, internal behaviours -like how employees start meetings-, or social movements -like collaborative campaigns-. When intentionally designed, these practices generate emotional belief, community identity and behavioural coherence.

Ambidextrous brands don’t dictate meaning; they shape the conditions for meaning to emerge and evolve through participation.

Identity, Resonance and Value Creation

Taking what Erich Joachimstahler -Vivaldi Partners- says in a much better articulated and argued way when talking about the ‘holistic brand model’ as a starting point, at the heart of the ambidextrous brand is the ability to integrate these three vital dimensions:

• Identity: This refers to the internal clarity the brand has about who it is, its aim, attributes, tone, personality, and worldview. Identity is the foundation of consistency. Without a well-articulated and widely understood identity, brands are vulnerable to fragmentation, dilution and confusion.
• Resonance: This is the emotional and symbolic alignment between the brand and its audiences. Resonance occurs when people see themselves -their beliefs, dreams or anxieties- reflected in the brand. It is what makes a brand meaningful, trusted and relevant. Resonance is not imposed, it is earned through cultural proximity and empathy.
• Value Creation: Brands exist to create value -for the business, for customers, and increasingly for society-. Value is not only functional -product performance- or emotional -feeling inspired-, it can also be ethical, social, symbolic or even spiritual. The best brands today are platforms of multidimensional value that touch different parts of people’s lives and aspirations.

Ambidextrous brands are able to maintain a consistent identity, create deep resonance, and deliver holistic value, all while navigating complexity and change.

Real-World Examples of Ambidextrous Brands

Let’s examine three brands that exemplify ambidextrous principles:

• Coca-Cola: Long positioned around happiness, joy and refreshment, Coca-Cola has masterfully preserved its symbolic essence while constantly evolving its products and messages. From the introduction of Coca-Cola Zero to recyclable bottles and regional flavours, it adapts to new expectations without losing its core. Its marketing shifts with culture, whether through personalisation -“Share a Coke”- or social themes -diversity and inclusion-. Coca-Cola is a ritual, a taste, a feeling, yet always in motion.
• Airbnb: Born from the idea of “belonging anywhere”, Airbnb has expanded its meaning far beyond lodging. It has transformed into a global hospitality and lifestyle platform. During the pandemic, it pivoted rapidly to offer long-term stays, digital experiences and flexible booking. It engages users as hosts and guests, creators and consumers, offering personalisation without losing its human-centred ethos. Its identity is rooted in connection and trust, yet its expressions adapt to global context.
• Tony’s Chocolonely: A disruptive brand in the chocolate industry, Tony’s purpose to end slavery in cocoa production is embedded in every decision, from product design to distribution. The brand’s identity is cheerful and bold, yet its message is serious. The irregular chocolate pieces symbolise the unfairness of the industry, and its supply chain transparency invites participation in a shared cause. Tony’s builds stories that matter and invites consumers to become co-authors of change.

These brands don’t just evolve, they evolve meaningfully, anchored in purpose and expressed through culture.

From Strategy to Execution | Simplicity is Smart

One of the greatest skills of ambidextrous brands is the ability to express deep, multidimensional strategy in a simple, actionable format.

This is the art of strategic synthesis.

In a world flooded with content, dashboards and data, clarity is a competitive advantage. If a brand’s strategic intent cannot be summed up in 15 powerful, human-centred words, it risks being misunderstood, or worse, ignored.

Strategic synthesis requires the brand to distil its ambition, its promise and its behavioural codes into a form that guides action across the entire organisation. This clarity becomes a compass that unites teams, aligns choices, and accelerates adaptation.

Simplicity, in this sense, is not reduction. It is precision.

Final Thoughts | Branding Without a Safety Net

Ambidextrous Branding is an evolutionary response to a world in flux -not a trend, Capisci?

It is about balancing permanence and change, direction and freedom, soul and structure. It transforms branding from a function into a cultural system, from a tool into a philosophy.

This approach invites businesses to build brands that are strong and soft, strategic and creative, rooted and mobile. It recognises that the most resilient brands are those capable of self-renewal.

There is no safety net, no final script. But there is purpose, clarity, and a shared commitment to creating value in motion.

The real question is no longer whether your brand stands out, but whether it can stand the test of change.

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Is your brand built to repeat, or built to evolve? Working on these issues with Allegro 234, developing an ambidextrous branding strategy is not a high cost, on the contrary, it is a smart investment. Others have already experienced this.

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