Truth in motion: how purpose-led founders build brands that evolve with them

Truth in motion is what happens when your story stops living in a slide and starts showing up in every awkward, high-stakes decision you make.

It is brand clarity proved in public, not performed in a workshop.

When pricing tests your values

Picture a founder who has finally got momentum.

A big prospect arrives, ready to pay, but they are the wrong fit: values off, expectations wrong, energy wrong.

On paper, the brand says "purpose-led, people first, long-term value". In reality, cash is tight and the Stripe notification would feel very good.

This is where most brands quietly step out of character.

The deck says one thing, the bank balance wins, and everyone agrees not to talk about it too much.

You can feel the gap open between what they say and what they do, and it gets wider with every "just this once" decision.

Truth in motion looks different.

It sounds like a founder saying: "If we take this, we are teaching our team and the market that our values are flexible if the number is big enough."

It shows up as a no to misaligned money, and a yes to smaller, truer work that actually fits the story they keep telling everywhere else.

What is truth in motion for founders?

Anthropologist Martin Holbraad writes about truth in Cuban divination as something made and remade through ritual, not just described from a distance.

Founders do exactly the same thing with their brands.

Truth is not in the value slide, it is in the pattern of choices: who they serve, what they charge, what they refuse.

If you want to see a founder's brand, do not start with their website.

Start with their last three pricing decisions.

Who did they discount for, who did they hold their line with, and how did they explain those calls to their team.

Clarity on paper vs clarity in motion

Most clarity work stops at documentation.

You fill in the boxes: purpose, values, audience, "what makes you different", maybe with a beautifully designed workbook and colour palettes waiting on the other side.

It looks and feels like progress, and some of it is.

There is nothing wrong with a strong foundation.

Fiona Humberstone's work, for example, does a good job of helping businesses get clear on who they are before they fuss over fonts.

You need that backbone if you are going to say anything coherent in the world.

The problem is what happens next.

Most brands treat clarity as a fixed asset: something you "did" once, ticked off, and filed under Brand.

The market moves, the founder grows, the product changes, but the story stays frozen at the version that went into the deck.

Clarity in motion treats the brand as a living system.

It says: "The story we wrote last year was true for who we were then. Is it still true now?"

Dynamic alignment means regularly updating the narrative, the offers and the behaviour to reflect the real, current version of the business, not the aspirational one that got signed off in a meeting.

This is where most purpose-led founders quietly suffer.

Their words and their reality drift apart, and they feel the strain every time they pitch or post.

You can hear it in the vague language, the hedging, the sense that they are dragging around a brand that used to fit.

The pivot that forces a story update

Take a founder who started with a scrappy, heart-on-sleeve impact project.

They were the person in the room, sleeves rolled up, fixing a problem for real people.

The story was simple: "I was tired of seeing good work buried under jargon and politics, so I decided to do something about it."

Fast forward three years.

They have a team, paying clients, maybe investment, and suddenly they are not just the scrappy outsider any more.

They are pitching to larger organisations, sitting in procurement processes, getting tagged as a "strategic partner" in board decks.

The work has evolved, but the public story has not.

The website still talks like a tiny founder-led project, the deck still leads with the original frustration, and the social content is stuck in early-stage hustle mode.

Internally, everyone is behaving like a grown business; externally, the brand is still playing the underdog.

At this point, there are two tempting options.

One is to quietly rebrand on paper: new logo, new copy, new tagline that sounds like a "proper company".

The other is to do nothing and hope no one notices the gap between how they talk and how they operate.

Truth in motion asks for a third path.

You name the pivot out loud and bring people with you: "We started as X. That was true then. Here is what we have learned, and here is who we are now."

You let your customers, your team and your partners see the update as it happens, instead of pretending you woke up one day fully formed.

This is where the work looks less like branding and more like anthropology.

You are not inventing a new truth; you are noticing how the practice has changed and adjusting the story to match.

You are treating every shift in the business as another piece of evidence in the ongoing experiment of who you are and what you are here to do.

Beyond the "customer journey"

Marketers love a neat diagram.

The "customer journey" has been the go-to metaphor for years: awareness, consideration, decision, retention, all marching left to right across a PowerPoint slide.

It looks tidy, but it quietly suggests something unhelpful: that the brand's job is to shepherd people along a track they designed in advance.

Research into deep metaphors in marketing talks about four big frames that drive how people think about brands: the Journey, the War, the Relationship and the Exchange.

You can see all of them in the wild.

Campaigns run like battles, funnels drawn like maps, "loyalty" programmes that really mean "keep buying".Truth in motion is closer to a conversation than a journey.

It is an ongoing mutual recalibration of reality between your brand and your audience: you act, they respond, you learn, you act differently.

No diagram survives contact with real people, but your pattern of adjustments can tell a very clear story about what you value.

When a founder reviews their last quarter, the most useful questions are not "How many people moved from awareness to conversion?"

They are questions like: "Where did we tell the truth clearly?" and "Where did we over-promise, under-deliver, or avoid saying the hard part out loud?"

That is the level where brands actually gain or lose trust.

Everyday practices for truth in motion

None of this works if it only lives in a clever article.

Truth in motion has to become a practice, or it turns into yet another piece of brand theatre.

At Story Of Me, we help purpose-led founders build brands that stay aligned with reality, not just the deck. This means working with the pattern of choices you are already making, not inventing a new story that sits on top of them.

Here are a few simple habits that help:

A monthly "truth audit"

Once a month, pick three real decisions: a pricing call, a hiring choice, and a piece of communication that mattered.

Ask: "Did this match the story we are telling about who we are?" and "If not, what would it look like to close the gap next time."

A decision diary

For the big calls, write down why you chose what you chose at the time.

Revisit those notes later with your team and look for patterns: where are you consistently honest, and where do you keep bending the rules you say you live by.

The Babel fish test

In Hitchhiker's Guide, the Babel fish lets you understand any language.

In your brand, the test is whether everyone in your team can explain, in their own words, what you stand for and what you refuse, without slipping into jargon.

If three people give three completely different answers, you do not have truth in motion.

You have three private versions of the story and a lot of hidden friction.

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The cost of the alternative

For purpose-led founders, this is the real work.

Not polishing slogans, but making hundreds of small, consistent choices that line up with what you say you care about.

Truth in motion is simply the name for a brand that has decided to let those choices be seen.

Because the cost of the alternative is higher than most founders realise.

When your words and your reality drift apart, when the deck says one thing and your behaviour says another, you pay in team confusion, market scepticism, and your own quiet exhaustion.

We explored the cost of confusion in depth: what it looks like when brands lose their truth, and why it matters more than most founders admit.

Truth in motion is not about perfection.

It is about staying aligned, repeatedly, in public.

If you are a purpose-led founder who wants help building a brand that evolves with you, not one that stays frozen in last year's deck, let's talk.