authentic, adj. = of undisputed origin, genuine; reliable or trustworthy
You hear the advice everywhere these days: Be authentic! Practice authentic marketing!
To be authentic is to be grounded in reality, to be real, to be yourself. If you’re authentic, you really are who you say you are and who others perceive you to be. If you market your business authentically, you represent yourself truthfully, genuinely. This is particularly important in sustainable marketing.
That calls for authenticity circulate through marketing conversations tells me there’s a need; a gap exists between who you are and how you market yourself or your business. Why is that? Why does anyone have to be reminded to “be yourself”? Why is authenticity in marketing so hard to accomplish? What can you do be authentic and practice authentic marketing?
The authenticity gap explained
Perhaps in your quest to meet your customers’ needs, you pose as someone you think they want you to be rather than who you are. If to be inauthentic means to not be who you are, something must be propelling you to behave that way. The most powerful explanation I can think of for the authenticity gap is role.
Role is a combination of behaviors and actions expected of an individual in a certain social situation. In everyday life, you perform a string of roles. You have little to no control over ascribed roles, like man/woman, child, member of a nation or culture. You do have a choice in assuming achieved roles, like parent, partner, member of a profession.
Business owner or manager or marketer is an achieved role you assume voluntarily when you’re running a business. You know your position as a business person comes with a set of expectations: people expect a business owner to behave a certain way, to do certain things. Because you know that conforming to those expectations will bring the rewards that come with the role (e.g. profit or status) and, vice versa, that failing to conform may mean lost rewards or other form of ‘punishment’, you conform. In the process of conforming to the role, you assume the identity of the role, losing your own.
If you think it a stretch to say role may erase personality, consider the Stanford Prison Experiment. To study the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or a guard, students were randomly assigned either role to play in a mock prison. Both guards and prisoners quickly became so absorbed in their roles that participants engaged in sadistic behavior, humiliating treatment, submission, and violence. The experiment was prematurely aborted to prevent further psychological and physical damage.
While becoming a sustainable business owner or marketer should bring out neither your sadistic nor your masochistic tendencies, the experiment underscores how role can affect your behavior. If you become absorbed in your role as a business owner, you will behave the way you think you’re supposed to as a business owner. So much so that the role will diminish or even overcome your true personality, the authentic self.
Making authentic marketing easier
Being authentic in your marketing, therefore, requires stepping outside your role as a business owner or marketer. It requires non-conformity. You’re not a businessman – you’re an individual who runs a business. You’re not a marketer – you’re a person who helps satisfy other people’s needs with your company’s offering. In fact, you will likely come across as authentic by not marketing at all (unmarketing).
How? Another piece of advice you probably hear often is, “Be helpful”. That means being helpful not only when your product can solve someone’s problem; it means being helpful in general, even when it won’t bring you or your company any immediate reward. Some call it “paying it forward”, others “common courtesy”, others still “building relationships” or “making friends”. What’s certain is that if you do it enough, you’ll become that person people know as helpful, which will breed trust, which will mean that whatever it is you’re actually selling will just happen to be a part of the package that is you.
What do you think? Why is authentic marketing so hard? How can you make it easier?
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Image credit: MR38
Reprinted on Sustainable Life Media, 9/24/09.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
One of the reasons we find it so hard to be authentic is because from a very early age we are taught not to be. We are taught to fit in with the crowd, do what the crowd is doing. When we become business persons we are taught to look at what the competition is doing, do what they are doing.
The business person or company that stands out, is authentic, shows who they are and what they care about, does open, honest and value driven marketing are the people who will succeed, over the long term, because it is becoming apparent to many that this is now what the customers are going to start demanding.
@Lynda: Precisely. Conforming to social imperatives is what roles are all about. Roles are social, and we learn the expectations and behaviors from our social environment.
Comments from the reprint on Sustainable Life Media, all 9/24/09:
Joan Friedlander said:
“I love Peter’s article. I’ve been having conversations with a few of my colleagues of lately, asking this very question. We have felt that the “accepted” marketing tactics we see employed by many of our colleagues feel contrived and manipulative. We have noticed that when we think that we try to do the same we’re uncomfortable, and worse, stopped in our tracks. What may have worked for us before – to some degree anyway – is no longer satisfactory.
We’re seeking a different pathway on which to make connections with people, and have decided that following our desire to simply connect with people wherever we are, and to engage in projects and activities that we’d want to participate in or conduct anyway, is a more satisfying way to go.
It’s certainly not easy to step away from the traditional marketing game, and your comment that stepping out of the role you play “requires non-conformity,” is right on target. Until you give it a shot you don’t know how it will turn out until you give it time. It requires faith and commitment.
Thanks for writing this article. I’ve shared it with my twitter, facebook and linkedin networks.
Joan”
Anonymous said:
“For any business, company or organization that is hard at work on what they do best, being “authentic” is useful and will add value, but, it isn’t the basic problem. The real problem they have is the first task of any marketing piece, or sales call for that matter: You have to get the ATTENTION of the qualified prospect. If you can’t get their attention you will NEVER be able to deliver your message, authentic or not. It is this imperative that leads marketers astray into silly, hyperventilated hyperbole, ridiculous graphics, wild unsupportable claims, and platitudes, platitudes, platitudes.
No matter how wonderful or valuable the product or service, no matter how conscientiously delivered, it won’t matter unless you can get the prospects to LISTEN (read, whatever)the marketing piece. Heartfelt prose and compelling content are valueless, as marketing, unless you can get the prospect to pay attention to it. How do you do that, it isn’t easy, but it also isn’t complicated. You must use terms, words, and phrases that are EMOTIONALLY tied, in the PROSPECT’s MIND, to the problem your product or service solves for the buyer. Put them in an easy to read HEADLINE and they will draw the qualified prospect in to find out how you propose to solve his problem (you’ve got about one second, give or take a nano second or two). Tell someone you understand what their problem is, tell them you provide a solution(and for pity’s sake don’t use the word solution). Now a prospect with a problem will spend as much time as necessary to get the information you’re offering.
There are 3 more critical parts of every ad that need to be included to produce the highest ROI possible for the ad or a campaign.”
EvanH said:
“It is hard because we have been taught that we have to be something other than who we are to be acceptable. It is hard because we should do things we don’t like or want to do.
Our mask makes up the difference between who we think we are and who we think we have to be to be acceptable.
Then there is all the encouragement to be fake – all that inflated marketing language. Sell it as THE answer, never hint that the product may not be everything possible and the best in the universe.
It all adds up to fakeness being expected.”
Ric Lum said:
“authentic actions and products in the market place as well as how we live our lives is essential to the idea of sustainable business practice!”