The Smoothness of Clarity.

Why we seek the unambiguous — even though reality is something else entirely.

I am sitting in a briefing. The marketing director of a mid-sized company lays out his expectations. He says: “We need more clarity.” I nod. Then he asks: “Can you do that with AI? It’s so much faster now.” I stop nodding.

Because what he means when he says clarity is something different from what I mean. He means: frictionless. Consistent. No rough edges. No contradiction. In short, he means: smooth.

This is not a criticism. It is not an isolated case. It is a pattern. And it worries me.

At some point I noticed that I use the word myself. Clarity. As the benefit of my work. As a promise to clients. I thought about where that came from and realised: AI had kept suggesting it to me. In texts, in positioning documents, in summaries. Then I saw it on LinkedIn. Then in the media. And suddenly clarity seemed to be the solution to every problem. Finally, thanks to AI, we can produce clarity. Finally we know what counts.

But on closer inspection, no clarity was emerging. What was happening was that everything abrasive was being removed. Everything was being made smooth.

As a brand consultant, it matters to me not to see brand work in isolation from the wider world. A brand comes to life in the political, economic and social context in which it lives, breathes and means something. Anyone who leads a brand without reading that context is leading blind.

And the context is unambiguous: clarity is the word of the moment.

In corporate mission statements and LinkedIn posts, in coaching podcasts and government communications, in campaign speeches and agency year-ahead outlooks — it appears everywhere, almost simultaneously, almost as if by arrangement. Copywriters trim texts for “maximum clarity” to capture dwindling attention. Self-help guides sell “mental clarity” as a competitive advantage. And linguists have long observed a counter-trend: the word is often deployed as a shield — “We need clarity here” — to sidestep hard decisions without actually saying anything.

A buzzword. A hollow phrase. And at the same time, a genuine longing.

The word everyone wants — and no one questions.

Clarity is not a neutral category. It is a demand. And like every demand, it reveals something about the world in which it is made — and about the world it wishes for.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han captured this in 2012 in his Transparency Society, with a sharpness that feels more relevant than ever: “Only the dead are transparent.” Han describes a society that wants to make everything visible — and in doing so kills what is alive. The transparency society is, for him, a positivity society: it avoids the negative, the contradictory, the opaque — not because these things are wrong, but because they slow down communication. Because they cannot be liked. Because they disrupt the flow of response.

I read that and think: this is also a description of modern brand management.

Han goes further: “Transparency creates trust” — so the promise goes. He inverts it: transparency destroys trust. Because trust arises where not everything has to be controlled. Because trust requires a residue of uncertainty. A society that bets on total transparency is a society of mistrust — one that falls back on control because trust no longer seems possible.

That applies to societies. And it applies to brands.

Why clarity and smoothness are not the same thing.

Here lies the crucial confusion I observe every day.

Clarity can be rough. Clarity can be uncomfortable. Clarity can polarise. Clarity is a stance — it says what you stand for, and accepts that others will stand against it.

Smoothness is something else. Smoothness is the optimisation for consensus. The absence of friction. The result that upsets no one — and truly moves no one.

We are witnessing the systematic production of smoothness. Not maliciously. But through the logic of the tools we use. Generative AI calculates probabilities: what follows most often? What finds the most agreement? What generates the least resistance? The result is technically correct. Often even elegant. But it is smooth.

Alke Martens, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rostock, made an observation on her Instagram channel that has stayed with me: for decades, the declared goal of AI research was to teach machines to speak. Now we have done it. And what happens? We start imitating the machine. People adopt a linguistic register that looks as if it were written by AI. The machine learns human language, and the human begins to imitate machine language.

That is not just absurd. That is the confusion in its purest form.

The problem is not the technology. It lies in what we do — or fail to do — with it. AI is an offer. What becomes of that offer is decided by the person behind it: their idea, their judgement, their willingness to discard the probable and choose the distinctive. Anyone who passes unedited AI output off as a brand voice does not have a technology problem. They have a stance problem.

If all brands use the same tools, draw on the same probabilities, skip the same human editing — what remains of distinctiveness? What remains of character?

I see it in pitches. I see it in positioning papers. I see it in campaigns. Everything sounds similar. Everything is somehow right. Nothing sticks.

That is not clarity. That is uniformity with a clear conscience.

Clarity has its place. Just not everywhere.

I do not want to be misunderstood. Clarity is not the enemy. It is a tool — and like every tool, it has its right place.

In leadership: clear decisions, clear priorities, clear responsibilities. Without these, every organisation falls apart. I see every day how much energy is burned in companies because no one clearly states what applies and what does not.

In crisis communication: when something goes wrong, people need orientation. Not poetry, not ambiguity, but: what happened? What are we doing? What can you expect?

In strategy: a brand that does not know what it stands for stands for nothing. Positioning is decision. And decision requires clarity.

All of that is true. And yet it is not enough. Because a brand is more than strategy. More than communication. Because a brand, when it truly works, does something that clarity alone cannot explain.

Brand is mystique.

I say this deliberately provocatively: brand is mystique.

Not in the esoteric sense. But in the original sense: mystique as that which eludes complete comprehension. Which means more than it shows. Which leaves room for projection, for longing, for appropriation.

Think of Apple in the 1990s. The brand was not clear — it was charged. “Think Different” is not a product description. It is an invitation to see yourself differently. The clarity lay not in the message but in the stance. And the stance left room — room for the user to recognise themselves in the brand. Room for the projection of their own values, their own rebellion, their own identity. Apple never explained who “different” was. That was intentional. Because the moment you explain it, you exclude. As long as you leave it open, you invite.

Think of Hermès. The brand does not explain itself. It presents itself. It waits. It lets you come — on its terms. Hermès has no discount campaigns. Hermès has no influencer partnerships. Hermès has waiting lists. The brand stages scarcity not as a deficiency but as dignity. Whoever owns a Hermès product has not simply bought something. They have arrived. Somewhere. At a place the brand never fully describes — and which is precisely therefore so desirable.

Think of Patagonia. The brand is political, contradictory, sometimes uncomfortable. It says things that irritate customers. It runs campaigns that work against its own revenue. “Don’t Buy This Jacket” was not a joke — it was a stance. And the brand is stronger than ever. Because it does not optimise. It believes.

The semiotician Roland Barthes described in Mythologies how brands and products become carriers of social meaning — how they stop being things and start telling stories. The anthropologist Daniel Miller goes a step further in The Comfort of Things: he shows how people use objects and brands to narrate themselves. Not what a brand says about itself, but what a person says about themselves when they choose that brand. In this sense, brand is not a sender-receiver model. It is a mirror. And mirrors do not work through transparency. They work through reflection.

Umberto Eco called this the “open work”: a work that does not explain everything, that leaves gaps, that invites the reader to participate in meaning-making. The incomplete is not weakness — it is invitation.

A brand that truly works is an open work. It gives direction, but no conclusion. It creates meaning, but not completeness. It makes you want something you cannot quite name.

That is precisely what optimised smoothness destroys.

Smooth for clear.

In my consulting work I observe a confusion that increasingly concerns me: companies mistake smoothness for professionalism. They mistake consistency for strength. They mistake the absence of contradiction for clarity.

The result is brands that are technically flawless and humanly empty.

Han describes the transparency society as a society that abolishes the secret. And with the secret, depth. A brand that explains everything no longer needs to be believed. It can be verified. And what can be verified loses its magic.

I am not saying: lie. I am saying: not everything needs to be said. The unsaid is often the most powerful thing.

An example: Rolex does not explain why a watch should cost €20,000. Rolex shows summits. Rolex shows the deep sea. Rolex shows people crossing limits — and on their wrist, what they wear. The message is never: “This watch is worth the money.” The message is: “You know who you are.” The unsaid — the price, the exclusivity, the social coding — is louder than anything that could ever appear in a tagline.

The illusion of clarity.

Here lies the fundamental error in thinking. Clarity as an ideal presupposes a world that does not exist.

It presupposes that the future is plannable. That markets are stable. That audiences do not change. That competitors act predictably. That the society in which a brand lives remains the same.

This reminds me of something that occupied me even during my business studies: the homo oeconomicus. That model of the rational, fully informed, utility-maximising human being on which large parts of classical economic theory are built. The homo oeconomicus makes rational decisions under total transparency. He knows all options. He evaluates them correctly. He chooses the best.

The problem: he does not exist. People decide emotionally, contextually, contradictorily, often irrationally. That is not a weakness — it is the nature of human decision-making. Behavioural economics has documented this systematically over recent decades. Daniel Kahneman has shown how little our decisions have to do with rational calculation. And yet we build strategies, brand models and communication architectures on the assumption that clarity leads to correct decisions.

We live in a VUCA world — volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Nassim Taleb showed in The Black Swan how systematically we underestimate the unpredictability of the world. We build models that exclude the unexpected — and are then surprised by the unexpected. Again and again.

The organisational theorist Karl Weick developed the concept of sensemaking: we do not understand first and then act. We act and understand only in retrospect. Clarity is often a retrospective construction. We tell ourselves we knew. That it was clear. But in the moment that mattered, it was not.

Clarity as a political promise is the clearest example. Populism is the clarity promise par excellence: simple answers to complex questions. Clear enemies. Clear solutions. Clear language. And what happens? Reality refuses to comply. The clarity of the promise collides with the unclarity of the world. The result is not clarity — it is frustration, on all sides.

Clarity that denies complexity is not clarity. It is simplification. And simplification is a form of dishonesty.

That applies in politics. And it applies in brand management.

A brand that pretends to have an answer to everything, that acts as if its world were free of contradiction, that tries to resolve every question with a tagline — that brand is lying. Not maliciously. But it is lying. And people sense it. Not always consciously. But they sense it.

What responds, resonates.

The question is not: clarity or chaos? The question is: what do people need in a time of multiple crises, fear of loss, change and genuine innovation?

I believe: they need orientation. Not clarity.

That is an important distinction. Clarity is cognitive. It answers questions. Orientation is existential. It gives direction, even when not all questions are answered. A compass gives orientation. It shows where north is. Not what the path looks like.

The sociologist Hartmut Rosa described in his theory of resonance what people truly seek: not optimisation, not control, not transparency, but a relationship with the world. The feeling that something responds. That something touches. That something means.

Resonance does not arise through clarity. It arises through contact. Through what strikes you without you being able to say exactly why.

Strong brands generate resonance. They touch. They mean something beyond the product. They create a relationship that cannot be fully explained — and which carries precisely because of that.

What do we need instead?

Stance over explanation. A brand that knows what it stands for and shows it without explaining it. That acts rather than communicates. That holds its position even when it becomes uncomfortable.

Narrative over transparency. People follow stories, not facts. Not because they are irrational, but because stories carry meaning. Because they condense experience. Because they translate the complex into something tangible without simplifying it.

The courage to hold tension. The ability to live with contradictions without resolving them. That is not weakness. It is one of the most important leadership competencies of our time — and one of the most important brand competencies. Brands that polarise endure. Brands that try to please everyone disappear into the middle. If you have no enemies, you have no real friends either.

The courage to leave gaps. What is left unsaid creates space. Space for projection, for longing, for appropriation. The strongest brands are not the most complete — they are the ones that leave the most room.

Those who step forward grow stronger.

I have observed over recent years how brands respond to crises. Some retreat into safety, into consensus, into smoothness. They optimise their messages. They avoid friction. They become quieter, so as not to upset anyone.

Others step forward. They take a stance. They risk contradiction. They say things not everyone wants to hear. And they grow stronger.

That is no coincidence. Whoever bets on smoothness in times of uncertainty loses the one thing that truly sustains a brand: character. Character does not emerge from consensus. It emerges from decision — from the moment a brand knows who it is and is prepared to stand by that. Even when it becomes uncomfortable. Even when not everyone understands.

That is brand strength. Not clarity. Not smoothness. But character.

A final thought: only the dead are transparent.

Byung-Chul Han writes: “Only the dead are transparent.”

I think of brands I have accompanied in my work. The strongest among them always had something impenetrable. Something that could not be fully explained. Something you felt before you understood it.

That is no coincidence. That is principle.

Brand lives from meaning. Meaning does not arise through transparency, but through condensation. Through omission. Through the decision about what is not said.

Hans Domizlaff, the founder of brand technique, formulated this almost a hundred years ago: the brand is a personality. And personalities are not transparent. They are complex, contradictory, sometimes hard to grasp. That is precisely what makes them interesting. Precisely what makes them human.

We live in a time when algorithms calculate probabilities. When tools write texts that are correct and smooth. When transparency is considered a virtue and secrecy a cause for suspicion. When clarity has become both a political promise and a brand imperative.

I believe: that is a danger. Not because technology is bad. Not because clarity is wrong. But because smoothness is not character. Because probability does not replace stance. Because transparency does not generate trust — it generates control.

What we need is not less clarity. What we need is more courage for depth. More willingness to endure the contradictory. More trust in what cannot be fully explained.

Brand is not a communication problem. Brand is a question of stance.

And stance, as anyone who truly has it knows, is rarely smooth.

References & thinkers cited in this article:

• Byung-Chul Han: Transparency Society, Polity Press, 2015

• Hartmut Rosa: Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, Polity Press, 2019

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan, Random House, 2007

• Karl Weick: Sensemaking in Organizations, Sage, 1995

• Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011

• Roland Barthes: Mythologies, Hill and Wang, 1972

• Daniel Miller: The Comfort of Things, Polity Press, 2008

• Umberto Eco: The Open Work, Harvard University Press, 1989

• Hans Domizlaff: Die Gewinnung des öffentlichen Vertrauens, Verlag Marketing Journal, 1939/1992