Authenticity continues to be a marketing buzzword – and the holy grail for brands looking to connect with generation Z. But as this group of entrepreneurial, digitally-empowered consumers – more adept at self-promotion than most people in a brand’s marketing department – grows increasingly cynical towards brands, what does it mean to be truly authentic? Being transparent, ‘caring’, showing your process, being straight-talking, down to earth, ‘all about provenance’… These kinds of brand messages have become a sea of same in a post-truth age where brands are more desperate than ever before to convince consumers that actually – despite what you might think – they do have a soul.
“What has more meaning these days
is bringing consumers inside the brand.”
Simon Sinek’s Start With Why TEDx video is getting old now. Sinek attributed Apple’s success to how the tech company believed in what it was doing – and everyone jumped on board. He argued the reason Apple was such a beacon of everything that was right in the world, was because it wasn’t just clear on what it did as a company, but that it believed wholeheartedly in why it was doing it. This became the magic bullet for success and a shortcut to brand authenticity: believe in what you’re doing, have a cause, have a system of values that inform everything you do, and people will have no choice but to trust your brand. People will think you’re authentic.
Every brand manager saw Sinek’s film in a marketing meeting at some point or another over the past eight years (yes, it went live in 2009), and everyone thought maybe their brand should ‘believe’ in something too. We all suddenly decided it was a good idea to know why we do what we do. If it works for Apple, it should work for us too, right? But when everyone is doing it, it begins to lose its meaning. When brands say ‘We believe’ (and they all do), there is obviously a sense of genuine sentiment about it; but when everyone believes, when everyone stands for something, it’s perfectly natural for consumers to be cynical. It’s perfectly natural to say, ‘Oh, here we go… Yet another brand telling us, ‘we believe’. Whatever.’
What has more meaning these days – what actually has resonance with modern, media savvy audiences – is bringing consumers inside the brand. Being transparent enough to really show your process, by involving your customers in it. And being genuine enough to ask consumers what they actually think about what you’re doing – and really listening to their answers. In the participation era, the smart brands are those that are empowering their consumers to collaborate with them, help shape the decisions they make and have a real say in the products and services they create. To be truly authentic is to be collaborative, democratic, open. To treat your consumers as colleagues rather than customers, involving them in constant two-way conversations about brand decisions and allowing them to co-create content alongside your brand.
A recent report from Iris identified ‘participation brands’ as those that involve their consumers in their creative and marketing processes, saying that these brands ‘outperform the market, drive advocacy and command a premium’. While in 2017, Forrester tells us that ‘more than one third of businesses will restructure to shift to customer-obsessed operations’. These reports point towards a future where brands will be forced to collaborate with their consumers. A future where for brands that connect directly to their audiences and involve them in their processes will be those that achieve success through true authenticity.
And with audience collaboration comes the ultimate goal for brands seeking authenticity: word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer recommendations. Consumers that feel like they’re really part of a brand are far more likely to be vocal about it, recommend it to friends and family and shout about it on social media. If you’ve created content for a brand, or had a real say in how that brand behaves, you’ll want to show your support and share relevant content online and through social media. And with Olapic’s Global Consumer Report 2016 revealing that 56% of consumers are more likely to buy a product after seeing it featured in a user-generated image, it’s not surprising that more and more brands seek peer-to-peer recommendations above anything else.
