The cult of authenticity

 

                                                    Screenshot from HBR Seminar, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

A couple of days ago, I listened in to a webinar introducing a new book: Don’t Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (And what To Do Instead). It’s by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology.

“Authenticity” is one of these words - like “diversity” or “inclusivity” or even “sustainability” - which is horribly over-used without much thought, whether for brands or personal development in business. So much so, that the author speaks of “The cult of authenticity”, which he dismantles in his book.

But let me take a step back. I suspect most of us growing up in the Western world have had this notion drummed into us from an early age. It may not have been labelled “authenticity” or have appeared on coffee cups and T-shirts, but the idea of expressing your individuality has long been with us as something innately Good. I still remember a song (Danny Kaye, I think?) from Tubby the Tuba. “Be yourself, you can’t be anybody else ... or you’ll always be a nobody ... be yourself - or else.” 

But what has happened with the rise of this cult is a simplification. One of those ghastly binaries. You’re either authentic or fake. And you’re only “allowed” to be authentic by the powers that be if your values and beliefs are on the approved list. As Dr Tomas said, your “whole authentic self” is not going to be welcome at work if you’re a misogynist Nazi in your spare time.

The most blindingly obvious thing to me, having studied psychology and Jung in particular is that most of us don’t actually know who we are. I have an inkling, but also know that it’s a work in progress. There are some who’d argue that there is no such thing as the self, and that we go through life wearing a series of masks or personas. Depending on context.

And that’s probably the main thing I took out of the seminar. Dr Tomas called for "less focus on expressing your authentic self and more on understanding others” and mentioned that the Authenticity Cult “typifies the egotisitcal self-absorbtion that characterises our times.” 

I scribbled this down - I’m not sure whether it’s from the book or someone else: “Maturity requires you to understand where the right to be you ends and your obligation to others begins ...”

Finally, I asked a question, which didn’t really get answered. What is the difference in emphasis between “authenticity” and “genuineness”? I’m still not sure - both can apply to objects and people. But genuine has more connotations of sincerity, integrity, human values, while authenticity feels more about provenance, lack of fakery and factual accuracy.

If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become ‘uninhabitable.’ Werner Herzog

And the brands played on

 

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It all started at the end of summer. It must have been this story that sowed the seed - the much-shared latter-day Cautionary Tale of Nike. Massimo Giunco posted Nike: An Epic Saga of Value Destruction - I echoed the thoughts of many, muddled in with my own ...

 

Sacrifice human relationships, specialist knowledge, experience, informed judgement and insight - from employees to suppliers to customers to shoppers - on the altar of "data-driven”. This is a sad tale, brilliantly written (“a cannibal ecosytem”, “... less effective but easier to be measured vs. something that was more effective but less easy to be measured ...”). But not without hope that one of the greatest brands of our time can survive this self-inflicted malady

Hot on Nike’s heels, this came along - an article by Anders Indset on the theme of Marketing is dead - long live Marketing! The author starts by reflecting back to the glory days of German ad agencies in the early 2000s (a nice little nostalgia trip for me). And then, how brands faded into the background as years of CpCs, click-marketing, Customer Journeys and search optimisation took over. But, he concludes: The world of platforms and click-optimisation has reached its logical endpoint. When everyone’s on the stage, no-one watches any more.

 

So, what now, in the age of ChatGPT and LLMs? Anders hails a return to the good old marketing of Kotler and Aaker - investing in brands, the 4Ps, good ideas. I’m definitely all for this, and will even forgive Anders his rather bizarre inclusion of the “American” Kevin Roberts and his Lovemarks amongst the marketing and advertising greats.

 

The next thoughts that flitted into my consciousness were those of Paul Worthington of invencion, on Quantitative Destruction and The Efficiency Delusion. In these articles, he writes of “quantitative myopia” - a dangerous and arrogant myopia that ignores complex reality while focusing intently on a simplistic, quantitatively measureable model, which they believe represents everything that matters.

 

The “they” in all this, the quantitative myopics, are the executives rising to the top of companies. Nike is one example. Starbucks is another losing value in its aim to become a closed-system, “category of one”, where it doesn’t matter if customers have a rotten experience as they have no choice.

 

Meanwhile, all this is exacerbated by marketing budget cuts and “having to do more with less.” Anything to do with the customer - marketing, experience, branding - is now on a very thin shoestring.

 

All of this is opinion, of course. So I’ll bring in some data. I'm not against data. But it doesn’t drive me. Or even inform me - only humans do that. The 2024 McKinsey report on the state of Marketing in Germany is called Back to the Future. What are the big topics close to the hearts of Germany’s marketers in 2024? AI? Marketing ROI? Yes, these are important, but they don’t make the top three most important. And these represent a return to the core competencies of marketing:

1. Creative content - a renaissance of originality

2. Brand-building

3. Authenticity - in word and deed.

 

The evidence reels in thick and fast - the brands are back in town. System1 have recently demonstrated how creative consistency (which doesn’t mean matching luggage, by the way) leads to creative quality, stronger brands and greater profits.

 

Which brings me right up-to-date with Interbrand and The Best Global Brands 2024, celebrating its 25th anniversary. There’s plenty to celebrate, but also a warning or two: performance marketing tactics can drive short-term financial gains, but an increasingly short-term mindset has cost the world’s most valuable brands significantly.

 

Interbrand’s advice is good - look behind the clever-cleverness of this phrase: the fastest-growing companies are not branding their businesses - they’re businessing their brand.

 

So, there we are. Branding being back in business is in the air. I expect the quantitative myopics would explain all this through a mixture of the algorithm, the Extrawurst echo chamber and she-would-say-that-wouldn’t-she. 

 

But I prefer to put it down to synchronicity.