The Minder

Who cannot place their hand on their heart and say that what consumers really want is authenticity? I can’t.

With sincerest apologies to the burgeoning authenticity industry, as documented in Gilmore and Pine’s What Consumers Really Want: Authenticity (and just about every bibliographic reference in it), what is mistaken as an appetite for authenticity is actually a desire for escape, denial, disguise, control and temporary or permanent identity shift. How can Gilmore, Pine and others claim that consumers want authenticity when even they agree that our world gets less real every day? Harley Davidson? Häagen-Dazs? Las Vegas? Plastic surgery? Reality television? Reality television about plastic surgery? Low calorie brownies? Designer knock-offs? Spas? Wrestling? PT Cruisers?

Maybe you can twist all this into some theory about real-fake, fake-fake and fake-real offerings (as Gilmore and Pike attempt), but the fact is, there is no mass market for the truly authentic in any category. Travel, food, clothing, health, entertainment, recreation, consumer goods, personal services, luxury and so on. There is craft, the quaint, home-made and farm stands, but not much else.

This is not to say that people want to be out-and-out lied to. The terms of the transaction have to be honest and the promises have to be kept, but the provider who can suspend my disbelief the longest, wins. We don’t want to be fooled, but we don’t mind fooling ourselves. Give me the perception of authenticity - no matter how un-real - and I’m yours.

And what is the quickest way to give the perception of authenticity? It is with story-telling, or as the ferociously authentic (skeptical empiricist) Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls it: the narrative fallacy - creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have a cause. His words are meant to apply to our inability to accept randomness of events, but they describe as well the roots of our collective desire for the inauthentic.

“We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotional laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage (b******t), the pompous Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Francaise, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated.”

Okay he sounds bitter, but he is right. People want to be lulled to sleep with bedtime stories. We want to be one step removed from reality because reality is too much work, and too scary. This is why the average American watches 32 hours of television every week. Is there ANYTHING authentic about watching television?

Just because people buy products, services and experiences that are labelled genuine, real, original, authentic, the first, true, classic etc. does not mean they value those qualities; they just want the label and the back story to connect it to some cognitive trigger that will make them feel better about themselves.

If I sound angry, it’s because I am. The flagging demand for things and experiences that are actually authentic means you have to drive farther, go deeper and work a lot harder to find the simple, the original, the unpaved, the un-story-boarded, the real deal; and then once you find it, you’ve worked so hard for it that is doesn’t seem authentic any more.  The commercial world is being turned into a story line and the non-commercial world is following close behind.

Maybe this is why I like to work in settings where fake doesn’t rule (yet), like professional services, education, health care, B2B, manufacturing, utilities, transportation, telecom etc.

The horribly cynical implication from Gilmore and Pine is this: to succeed, create the perception of authenticity. Are they right? Or is there hope for real?

From Peter C. Newman going on about power games to Naomi Klein dissing brands altogether to Andrea Mandel-Campbell telling us why Mexicans don’t drink Molson beer, we just have not had a lot of optimistic discourse on Canadian brands in the last 40 years. Jeannette Hanna’s and Alan Middleton’s new book Ikonica has changed that. In short, Hanna/Middleton show that brands=values and that Canadian values=good brands and that Canadian companies can win globally on the basis of our own particular brand genius.

Full disclosure: Jeannette is a long-time collaborator of mine, and my sister-in-law, and I was very lucky to have been able to watch and cheer from the sidelines as the ideas in Ikonica took shape. The end product - which I hope is really just the beginning of a national discourse - is a treasure.

The book - structured as a field guide, beautifully designed by Paul Hodgson and written to be read with pleasure - opens by putting Canadian brands into their historical and cultural context. The authors propose an 11-point model of what makes Canadian brands Canadian. I love this part. Communitarian, chameleon-like, sceptical, collaborative….for example. When I think of the great Canadian brands I’ve worked with, these attributes are not just accurate, they are at the heart of what has made them successful.

Then come the stories. 24 interview-based stories - some with the usual suspects (Timmies, WestJet, Roots) - but also some lovely surprises (Dynamic Funds, TIFFG, Environics, McCain Foods). All the stories come across as intimate reflections by these organizations’ leaders about what has motivated them and the values they have built and modelled in order to succeed. These stories are at times funny, moving and silly but always persuasive.

The book will not disappoint practitioners with its very tidy little model that uses Community, Culture and Commerce as filters for values-based brand strategy. It’s just such great and useful stuff.

Ikonica is not going to change what it means to be Canadian. So much of what is in this book feels like us and is reassuringly familiar. What it could change is how we see the potential of our values to change the way the world thinks about brands, about Canada and about our role in shaping modern commerce.

The world is looking for what comes next after the monolithic all-about-me phase of American-style branding. Look no further. The future of the truly global brand starts here.

I am fascinated by the presence of intense contradictions in organizations. It may be possible that the highest performing, most innovative organizations are the ones that can manage the greatest degree of internal paradox, and not spin out of control, or lose their centre. (Read on …)

Corporate values are sets of beliefs that shape behaviour in organizations, and they strongly determine internal and external perceptions. In several projects linking corporate values to brand and organizational change, I’ve been working with a three-tiered model of values, which is helping to make the job of managing values a bit easier.  (Read on …)