Everywhere you turn these days, you hear about authenticity.
They say that you have real to connect with today's savvy audience of social media and consumers.
But this is not always true.
Go out and be a "real" when you have a bad day, and people quickly will call you for not responding to "correct" way.
Or, cross the line with your audience, hampered by their expectations of you, and you'll quickly find that people don't want that much of the "real you" in the end.
And yet, this is unavoidable — the world of marketing in General and, in particular, online marketing, has gravitated to a greater emphasis on authentic human voice for canned messages and corporate speak.
So what happens to this stuff authenticity?
Glad you asked. Let me give you a little bit offbeat example with "authentic" t-shirt on the way to respond to you.
I kid t-shirt.
I particularly liked the cool t-shirts that I owned forever, sometimes for decades, and they show it.
I am proud of my SXSW Interactive shirt since 2000, even though it has seen better days. And I was mortified when I had to replace my Joy Division, unknown pleasures t-shirt after he had been "liberated" during a party I threw at the law school, but what are you gonna do?
Let's look at the larger trends in t-shirts "harvest":
Group 1: the people who have the cool t-shirts that they bought way back when, and now proudly wear as hipster icons raggedy honor.Group 2: people who shop in shops, vintage clothing, looking at old, ironic t-shirts, perhaps hoping to be regarded as members of the Group 1, or at least ... It is ironic.Group 3: people who buy new reprint old, popular t-shirts, then buy other products to begin a process of thorough improvement of the old t-shirt appearance, so that they appear in the Group 1 or 2.Group 4: people go to buy the same t-shirt as group 3, with the exception of those shirts pre middle-aged manufacturer effectively commodifying Group 1, 2 and 3.If you agree with me that the Group 1 is only the "authentic" sample with each subsequent group, diverting away from authenticity?
And yet, people are spending good money on things that are not "real". In fact, groups 3 and 4 are often spend more money to appear authentic than people who actually qualify.
Is it really true that people want "real", or maybe they want to ... something else?
The problem with authenticity in marketing the age-old. And the emergence of social media has allowed people to forget Marketing 101 and back to self-absorption.
In other words, you focus on your favorite people — yourself — instead of focusing on the people you are trying to reach and influence.
Seth Godin famously said that authenticity in marketing story telling people want to hear, and then make the story come true (or false). He caught some flack for this, but that doesn't make it any less valid.
And yet, even this is misleading, because you start to think that it's your story that counts.
Your story is, but only to the extent that it helps people tell the story they want to tell about yourself.
Very few of the things we buy are really needed.
Everything else we buy used as a way of telling the story of who we are, what we believe and what we aspire to be.
Thus in the example, the t-shirt, people will go to great lengths to engage in "unreliable", because it helps them to say something about myself that desirable. This is really for them, and that's all that matters.
I tell you fake?
No, I tell you to get your head in the right place.
Focus on them.
Compare these aspects of yourself, your products and your services. But never forget that you're helping them tell their own stories as you create your own.
Creating content, products and services that assist in the narrative of the life that we all share.
Help people to tell who they are, how they feel and what they aspire to be.
This is about as real as it gets.
