Volume 155: Authentically Fake.
Authentically Fake.
tl;dr: Yet more bullshit in branding.
First, I need to put my cards on the table. I’ve never valued authenticity as a branding concept. I’ve always found it nonsensical on its face, and no matter how many clients or colleagues I’ve met who throw the term around with abandon, I never know what they’re on about.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I get it. I get that it’s meant to be about being real, not sugarcoating, being transparent and genuine, following through consistently, and not overselling features or functions. It’s the sterility and oh-so-boring self-righteousness it inevitably generates I have a problem with.
My life is authentic enough already. I don’t need brands to reflect it. My greying, thinning hair, ever-expanding gut, and left hip that’s started to hurt in the morning. I also don’t want brands that reflect my average boring-ass day: Get out of bed, take the dogs for a pee, work, take the dogs out again a few more times, talk to some clients over Zoom, have dinner with my family, write a little Off Kilter, watch TV or read a book and eventually go to bed. Rinse repeat.
This is why authenticity is so much bullshit. Every brand is fake, no matter how authentic it may claim to be. It’s just that those wrapped in a cloak of “authenticity” are terminally dull and forgettable. This is because brands are artifice, no matter how “real” we might think we’re being. The entire concept of what a brand is and how it works reflects the power of image-making, so authenticity, no matter how much you think you’re reflecting it, isn’t possible. And by trying to fake your way to reality, all you do is turn people off rather than turn them on. Why? Because no matter what people might tell you on a survey, most don’t want you to reflect a boringly forgettable reality. We want you to be a memorable escape, even if it’s momentary.
Why is Santa red? Because Coca-Cola advertising popularized it. Think Polo is authentic? It sure looks like that because the designer is a master of artifice, but when the brand was created, Mr. Lauren was a kid from the Bronx, where there aren’t a lot of horses, let alone a polo field. He chose it because he liked sports. He had literally zero connection to that particular sport before creating the label.
Look at any truly successful brand, and what you’ll find isn’t authenticity at all but carefully managed and constructed image-making. Some entire categories, like luxury Swiss watches, are the product of years upon years of carefully crafted artifice.
So, why mention it now? Well, because of three things:
A DTC category that draped itself in “authenticity” is collapsing as we speak.
Authenticity represents lazy thinking and an abdication of responsibility to build your own world of artifice, AKA standing out.
Authenticity is a classic example of flawed research leading to wrong-headedness, ultimately leading to poor business outcomes.
Let’s take each in its turn.
First, how many DTC brands have you seen claiming “authenticity” when, in reality, they’re little more than a Lego kit version of a brand? Same wireframe, same colors, same “real-people” imagery, same aesthetic tropes, same Shopify-enabled commerce engine…and even the same origin story focused on how the founders couldn’t find a version of whatever-the-hell, that fit their needs and desires, so they made it their life-mission to create it. Bullshit. If you’ve ever met these founders, they’re typically businesspeople who saw an opportunity to present a lower-cost version of a product that they then successfully pitched to a VC investor. This matters because of how many of these there are, how commoditized they are as a result, and how instantly forgettable. To the point that we barely even notice as they increasingly go bankrupt.
Second, authenticity represents lazy thinking. It’s simply an abdication of responsibility to create the artifice that takes people out of their day-to-day. Anyone can reflect reality. It’s all around us. It’s easy. And it’s really f’ing lazy. And lazy does not deserve to succeed. Since I was just talking about it, let’s use the laziness of DTC as a foil and compare it to, say, Liquid Death. This is a brand that doesn’t even pretend to be remotely “authentic,” yet it’s done an absolutely stellar job of layering together a compelling story of brand-artifice. Liquid Death shouldn’t really work at all. It’s competing in the most overtly branded and competitive commodity category on earth - water. Yet look how successful it’s become. Why? Not because it draped itself in the authenticity of the provenance of the water, the ideals of the founder, its desire to save the planet, or any of the other boring-ass water tropes out there. Nope. Instead, it literally turned category conventions on its head and set out to be flat-out entertaining. It’s not programming itself for an algorithm; it’s creating a sense of frivolous escape for human beings. And guess what, sometimes we quite like a bit of frivolous escape as an antidote to the real.
Third, and this is a big one, there are times when poorly constructed research leads to widespread wrong-headed thinking and terrible business outcomes as a result. When you do research and people tell you they want authenticity, what does that mean, and should you pay attention? Well, here’s a controversial opinion. Just because someone says something doesn’t mean they have any clue what they’re saying, nor does it mean that’s how they’ll ultimately behave. It’s up to us as professionals to take what they’re saying, translate it, interpret it, and use our interpretation rather than their responses to inform what we ultimately do.
One of the biggest errors we make, again and again, is to think that just because everyone is a consumer that everyone knows how marketing, advertising, branding, etc, work. They don’t. I use an iPhone every day. This doesn’t make me an expert in how the iPhone works. I could no more figure out how to build an iPhone than I could operate on a human brain or send a rocket into space. To think I could is, quite frankly, ridiculous.
To illustrate this relative to branding, let me tell you a story from almost thirty years ago. Just after I graduated college, I went to stay with a friend who lived in Edinburgh. He worked for the now-defunct Scottish and Newcastle brewery and had just spent months doing focus groups with beer drinkers. His apartment was vast, chopped up from what must have been a truly magnificent Edwardian-era home. The rooms were grand, with ceilings that towered toward the stratosphere. And, stacked floor to ceiling, was more beer than I’d ever seen before or since.
Turns out that after the focus groups had finished, he’d been keeping the leftover beer…and nobody had said anything. So here we were, doing our level best to eliminate the evidence.
What was particularly striking were all the packaging differences. There were cans and bottles, tall and short, fat and thin. There were different colors, labels, and logos. There was bold, there was subtle. There was attitude, and there was provenance. You name it, it was there—a literal smorgasbord of beer. I must admit that I felt like a kid in a playground because I’d never heard of any of them before (more on that in a minute), and I was determined to try them all.
After a while, and as the empties began to pile up, I expressed my preference for one of the brands we’d been drinking…to which he laughed hysterically as only the very drunk can.
You see, the beer inside the cans and bottles was exactly the same. The only difference was the packaging, and I’d been suckered into thinking this one label and bottle was superior to all the others. Except it wasn’t, well, not objectively anyway. Yet if you asked me, I could’ve sworn blind that it was better. It was; it had to be.
Yet it wasn’t. It was the product of my imagination, spurred on by the artifice of the packaging.
And this, my friends, is why we must always interpret and translate what we hear from consumers in research. They don’t know how this stuff works; they just think they do. It’s our job to take claims like a desire for “authenticity” and the real and interpret it, try to understand what it is they’re really saying, and most importantly of all, use it as a part of a broader look at where we might have an opportunity to play or to identify where we should absolutely not play at all.
So, next time you’re in a meeting and you’re tempted to throw around the term “authentic” or “authenticity,” don’t. That’s just being lazy. Instead, take a step back and think about the world of artifice you’re creating and how that’s going to make your brand stand out rather than fit in.