Authenticity

Over the weekend our Design Planning Workshop team started conducting in-home interviews with participants that participated in our camera-journal study. It was a great experience interviewing people about their shopping habits, asking them about the choices they made, their feelings about shopping, why they chose particular retailers and more.

In the first interview, the participant talked some about shopping for outdoor gear and clothing and how he felt REI had lost some authenticity as it went after more customers, reaching out to less core outdoor people in order to grow.

Authenticity is so incredibly important and something that many brands are trying to obtain and others that have it are trying to maintain. I think many big companies believe that they can place an order for authenticity and have their people just conjure it up. But there aren’t a ton of huge companies that are truly authentic – Nike, Apple, Harley, Starbucks off the top of my head. There are more in the mid-tier such as Patagonia, Method, Jones Soda and a ton on the small side – Alterra Coffee Roasters in Milwaukee or Left Field baseball cards in Dallas when I was growing up come to mind. It’s a pyramid and as a company goes up the pyramid their size (revenue, employees, market share, product lines, etc.) increases but the odds of remaining authentic goes down it seems.

When you’re a small business and you’re doing what you love, the authenticity is crystal clear. The owners of Alterra simply get jazzed about coffee and they’re passionate about the environment. Their place on Lincoln Memorial Drive is in an old municipal river flushing plant and includes an in ground filtration system where parking lot water runoff is directed. Dunkin’ Donuts could put a drainage system in each of their stores but that’s not organically grown out of who they are. They would be retrofitting their story – retro-storytelling I guess.

Alterra’s founders still touch most of their employees and locations, I would imagine on a daily basis in some cases, and are in touch with their customers. Also, they haven’t tried to get too far into the weeds trying to generate new revenue sources. Best as I can tell a combination of those three is your best prescription for losing your authenticity – culture/passion weakens as you grow; your interaction with and empathy for your customers weakens; and your product loses relevancy (Starbucks selling DVDs) with its true purpose.

The less your core radiates authenticity, the less distance your brand can travel without losing the effects from the core. It’s interesting to note that those authentic Fortune 500s all have a powerful cultural figure (Phil Knight, Steve Jobs, Willie G. Davidson, Howard Schultz). So without a cultural figure, or at least a way to harness and keep that figure alive “in the walls,” can you get bigger and still be authentic?

The second question is, can a big company create authenticity, whether in reinventing their brand or creating a new one from scratch? I believe this is exceedingly difficult. The only example I can think of right now is Toyota’s creation of Scion.

In our Concept Evaluation class we read an HBR case study on Song, Delta’s attempt at a low-cost carrier (LCC) to compete with Southwest, Jet Blue, and others. Two things stuck out in this – the search for a target audience and the Song Credo. To keep this post from becoming Dickensian in length, I’ll write about the target audience issue in a separate post, but do want to talk about the Credo. Here it is:

We are not an airline, we are a culture.
A culture founded by optimists – and built by believers.
We are not an airline,
We are listeners, innovators and technology creators,
We are not an airline,
We are magicians, acrobats and sprinters focused on a single goal: to give style, service and choice back to the people who fly.
That’s why we’ve “cast” our talent – to make sure each and every one is attentive and gracious.
Why we offer everyone 24 channels of real time, satellite TV and CD quality MP3 audio.
Why we handpicked a socially conscious chef – to prepare fresh meals and cater to diverse tastes.
Why Kate Spade designed a collection for our talent, whey we created exclusive programming for families, and offer cosmopolitans in the air.

That’s the halfway point, so I’ll stop. Not to bag on Song/Delta, because I’m sure it sounded really good at the time in a conference room or at team events, but this just reeks of phoniness. In the heat of the moment, who isn’t for this? Who doesn’t want to work for a place like this? Hell, I would grab a rifle and march along to bring Song to the world if I was at Delta during this time. But reality is, it’s contrived and any of us reading this knows it. We know it’s not authentic and sincere. Why? I would say gut feeling; cheesiness; knowing it wasn't the result of honest passion and enthusiasm; knowing that Delta created it. After all, if Delta management truly believed the Credo, why was it not woven into the Delta airline already?

Short of the obvious (not doing it), the best option would have been to I started to write that Song's best hope would've been to hire forceful, passionate, enthusiastic people who truly at their core felt this was their mission, their reason for getting up in the morning. But then, they may have done that but it might simply not have been enough because they were harnessed to Delta. As Hasso Plattner said at this May's Institute of Design Strategy Conference, "The resistance of the conservative masses is substantial." And that may be another reason why a big company can't create authenticity from scratch.

Thoughts?

Comments

[Leah]

Authenticity is about you the customer, client, live person interested in my products and services, not "we the company"! We the comapny has to get out of the way, out of the center... hey, kind of like marketers, says a marketer!

[sean scott]

authenticity is passion for me before it is customer. How authentic a brand is, largely depends on how true to its original passion can it be. Can it grow its customer base without losing sight of what made it relevant in the first place.

Customers especially the early adopters will flock to a brand if the passion is there.

[chimera]

Funny, I just posted an example of "authenticity" on my blog motifmarketing.com yesterday. As a designer, design thinking made me successful at selling beyond my wildest expectation, I outperformed the total company by 100% in the years I sold product for a manufacturer. I will never forget the introduction of TQ to the company I was working for - TQ was "the way I did business everyday" but the real concepts were obviously way beyond even the guy explaining the concept to a full room of people. TQ, Six Sigma and all those other "isms" are not "thinking." Lack of authenticity comes from "group think" and consumers can smell it a mile away. Design thinking is simple problem solving for one or for an entire target market and consumers know the difference between a self-serving solution and one that has them foremost in mind.

[todd kalhar]

Something struck me in your post at the end ... "[Song was] harnessed to Delta." I think that's where the authenticity test fails ... had Delta truly let Song go off on its own and form a unique identity, it might have had a better chance to succeed and not come across as "cheesy".

Lori Adams and Dermont Waters of CNN.com made a presentation a month ago at Adaptive Path's UX Week conference and they spoke a bit about how their relaunch of the CNN.com site could have been hampered by being tethered to the existing norms and culture of the company. Instead, they initiated a "Relaunch Protection Program" where they physically relocated the relaunch team to another facility to protect it from "drive-by's" and bureaucracy. You can get their session slides at http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/slides/uxweek-slides_adams_waters_cnn_relaunch.pdf if you want to see the highlights.

Innovation and authenticity seem to both require independence ... from past practices, current bureaucracy, and preconceived notions or expectations. Without the freedom to do things differently, many of these attempts end up as "pet projects" doomed to failure.

Great post! Thanks for the thoughtful insights!

[caleb chang]

I remember in junior high when I took a job in a two-bit telemarketing job. We were petitioning people to sponsor underprivileged kids so that they to the circus. The daily objectives were to get the most amount of sales - people promising to send money. But, where the telemarketing company only made money when there was proof in the pudding - mailed donations. On the average, I was middle-low when it came to the daily sales target. But, I had the highest ratio of sales/donations mailed in. Why? Because I believed in the cause and I made my reluctant listeners believe in it too. What did I learn from this? Authenticity cannot be faked. It was only years later that I found out it was a scam.