Karma comes from the Sanskrit word karman — meaning simply “act.” Over thousands of years it evolved from a Vedic ritual concept into something most people today take for granted: do good, receive good. The universe keeps score. What goes around comes around. Most people get that. But take a deeper look and a problem starts to emerge
Good According to Whom?
Somewhere along the way, business borrowed this idea. Consider the idea of “brand karma” — the notion that brands which do good build equity over time, while brands thatdon’t make this a priority eventually pay a price. It’s an appealing concept. And there’s real truth in it. But it has the same flaw as the original — it assumes we all agree on what good and harm actually mean.
We don’t. And that changes everything for brand strategy
THE CORE TENSION
> Two beliefs. Both completely defensible.
There are two philosophical positions that have governed human moral reasoning forever. They’ve always coexisted. Right now they’re in open conflict — and it’s fueling most of the division we see around us.
Think of it as two camps. The Pragmatist and the Purist.
The Pragmatist: the ends justify the means. Outcomes are the measure. If the mission matters enough, the method is secondary. Results prove rightness.
The Purist: it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. Process is the measure. Principle isn’t a constraint on success — it’s the source of it. How you get there matters as much as where you arrive.
These aren’t political positions. They’re existential ones. And here’s what makes them so combustible: actions that flow from one are genuinely inflammatory to believers in the other. Each side looks at the other and sees a moral failure.
The Pragmatist sees the Purist as someone who’d rather feel good about losing than make a hard call. The Purist sees the Pragmatist as someone who rationalized their way out of accountability. Both are partly right.
THE ILLUSTRATION
> Meet Amy Howe and Manish Chandra.
I want to show you what this looks like in practice. These are two of the most respected leaders in the consumer economy right now. Both were successful. Both principled. Completely opposite definitions of what doing the right thing actually means.
Built her career at McKinsey, ran Ticketmaster — where she doubled gross ticketing value and grew mobile by 400% — then arrived at FanDuel in 2021 as the first female CEO of a major online sportsbook. Awarded. Respected. By every internal account, deeply principled about how she leads. She also leads a business that profits from sports betting, a product with documented links to addiction and financial harm. She doesn’t hide from that. She believes FanDuel is in the entertainment business. Legal. Transparent. Delivering what people actually want, done well.
“We have a set of values that everybody can recite. The top team has to role model these values, or the values are meaningless.”
Grew up in India, spent summers in his grandfather’s wholesale shop watching deals get made, came to the US and founded Poshmark in 2011 — starting from his wife’s closet and an iPhone 4. He founded Poshmark on a belief that commerce could mean something. Community. Sustainability. Connection. Not bolted on as marketing — baked into the model from day one. His philosophy, stated plainly: if you focus on love, everything happens. If you focus on money, nothing happens.
“Community is about joy. It’s about connection. It’s about trust and it’s about sustainability.”
Same era. Same consumer economy. Two completely opposite definitions of good. And here’s what makes this genuinely interesting for brand strategy — neither of them is wrong.
THE KEY INSIGHT
> We don’t live permanently in either camp.
Take FanDuel. To the Purist, sports betting is irresponsible by design — a product that preys on impulse, targets the vulnerable, and profits from addiction. The harm is documented. The model is built on it. No amount of responsible gambling messaging changes what the business fundamentally does. But to the Pragmatist, FanDuel didn’t trick anyone. The product is legal. For most users it’s entertainment — the same kind of controlled excitement people find in a night at the casino or a Sunday in a fantasy football league. Howe’s position is coherent: in a world of imperfect choices, delivering a well-run version of something people genuinely want is a legitimate form of value. Both verdicts are sincere. Both follow logically from the belief system underneath.
Now take Poshmark. To the Pragmatist, secondhand shopping carries a stigma that’s hard to shake — a signal that you couldn’t afford new, that you’re wearing someone else’s discards, that you’ve accepted less. In many communities that perception is real and it matters. But to the Purist, Poshmark didn’t sacrifice growth for principle. Chandra’s position is equally coherent: you can build a billion dollar business and make the world better simultaneously. Keeping clothes out of landfills, empowering sellers, building genuine community around fashion — the discipline of doing all of it at once makes the company stronger, not weaker. Again, both verdicts are sincere. Both are defensible.
Here’s what nobody says out loud: most of us are both. We don’t pick a philosophy and stick to it. We apply the Pragmatist view in some situations and the Purist view in others — and we do it pretty consistently based on what’s at stake, who’s affected, and how close it hits to home. It’s not hypocrisy. It’s human.
The question isn’t which one you are. The question is which one your audience believes you are — and whether your actions are consistent with that belief.
Brand karma doesn’t live in a universal moral code. It lives in the perception of consistency between what you claim to stand for and what you actually do — judged by the people watching.
THE IMPLICATION
> Morality is tribal. So is karma.
If two thoughtful, principled, successful leaders can arrive at opposite moral verdicts from the exact same facts — the conclusion is unavoidable.
There is no universal moral code. Good and evil are not fixed points. They are perspectives shaped by the belief system underneath.
Which means karma is tribal too. You can’t earn good karma with everyone, because everyone doesn’t agree on what good means. Brand karma operates within belief systems, not across them. The return on ethical behavior depends entirely on whether your audience shares your ethics.
And here’s why that matters more than ever. Brands have become the tribes people join to confirm and express their personal beliefs. It’s not just about the product anymore. When someone shops at Erewhon, they’re signaling something about how they think food and wellness should work. When someone fills their cart at Walmart, they’re making a statement too — about value, access, and what matters in daily life. The brand becomes a badge. A declaration of what you believe.
Here’s the thing — most of us shop at both. Walmart on Tuesday, Erewhon on Saturday. We’re not contradicting ourselves. We’re just human. And that’s exactly the point. Every time we choose one over the other, we’re signaling something about what matters to us in that moment. We move between tribes depending on the context. But the brands that earn the deepest loyalty are the ones whose position is clear enough that when you’re in their tribe, you know exactly why you’re there.
That’s why a brand without a consistent moral position on the issues that matter to its audience isn’t just strategically weak — it has no tribe to build karma with. No shared belief system. No foundation. Think about what that means:
- A brand that tries to earn karma with everyone earns it with no one
- Messaging so broad it says nothing is not safety — it’s invisibility
- Universal appeal is not just difficult to achieve — it’s structurally impossible in a world with no shared moral foundation
- The brands that build real karma have picked a tribe, understood what that tribe believes, and stayed consistent — even when it costs them
Patagonia loses revenue every time it tells customers not to buy its products unless they need them. It earns deep, compounding, tribal karma with the community that believes restraint is a form of integrity. Nike earned karma with a specific tribe when it backed Colin Kaepernick, and burned it with another. That wasn’t a miscalculation. That was a choice. The most effective brand strategy decisions always look like values decisions — because they are.
THE STRATEGY
> Take a stand. But know where you stand.
Here’s the thing about brand identity — most people inside an organization already feel it. There’s usually a shared intuition about what the company stands for, what it refuses to compromise on, who it’s really for. It lives in the culture. In the way the founder talks about the work. In the decisions that get made under pressure.
But instinct doesn’t scale. The moment an organization grows beyond a handful of people, that felt sense starts to fragment. Different people interpret it differently. Well-meaning individuals fill the gaps with their own judgment. A marketing director goes one way. A salesperson goes another. A campaign launches that feels slightly off. Over time, without anyone intending it, the brand drifts — and with it, the karma it was building.
This is why brand strategy exists. Not to invent something artificial. Not to create a positioning statement that lives in a deck and dies in a drawer. But to capture what’s already instinctively true about a brand — to make it explicit, documented, and shared so that everyone in the organization is expressing the same belief, consistently, across every touchpoint.
Marketing moves product. Brand strategy builds the belief system that the tribe joins. They are not the same thing. Without that foundation, any stand you take is just noise. With it, every decision you make — what you say yes to, what you say no to, who you hire, who you serve — becomes an act of karma. A deposit into the tribal account. Consistent, compounding, and real.
Deep trust within a defined community beats shallow approval everywhere. Always.
And here’s something most brands get wrong: alienating some people isn’t a side effect of good brand karma. It’s often evidence of it. A brand nobody dislikes probably doesn’t stand for anything. A brand that some people love and others push back on has found its tribe. That tension isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a signal you’re doing something right.
THE ONLY CONSTANT
> The law of return.
Let’s come back to where we started. Karma. The ancient idea that your actions have consequences — that what you put into the world comes back to you. It’s a beautiful concept. And in the context of brand strategy, it’s true. Just not in the way most people think.
Brand karma isn’t universal. It doesn’t operate across belief systems — it operates within them. The Pragmatist and the Purist will never agree on what “good” means. Your tribe and someone else’s tribe will judge the same decision completely differently. That’s not a problem to solve. It’s the reality you’re working within.
What this means practically is that the brands that build lasting karma aren’t the ones trying to please everyone. They’re the ones who have done the hard work of knowing what they actually believe — and then living it consistently, in public, over time. Through every campaign. Every hire. Every decision about what to say yes to and what to say no to. That consistency is what builds the tribal trust that compounds into something no competitor can easily copy.
But here’s the one thing that cuts across every tribe, every belief system, every philosophical camp: inauthenticity is always detected. The Pragmatist and the Purist disagree on almost everything. But both can tell when a brand is performing values it doesn’t actually hold. Both react the same way — distrust, then disengagement, then rejection. You can disagree with a brand’s values and still respect its consistency. You cannot respect a brand that says one thing and does another. No tribe forgives that.
So the work is simple, even if it isn’t easy. Know what you actually believe. Document it. Share it across your organization so it holds together under pressure. Express it consistently. Accept who it won’t resonate with. And then let karma do what karma has always done — return value to the people who’ve earned it.
Not universal value. Tribal value. The only kind that’s real.
// jamie
At Flux Branding, the first question we ask every client is the same one: what do you actually stand for — and does everything you do reflect it? That question is where lasting brand strategy begins. Let’s talk.