"Being authentic" isn't a strategy

Everyone wants it, no one can define it, I'm tired, you're tired, we're all tired.

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Just for fun

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“Being authentic” isn’t a strategy

My observation

A pattern I’m seeing across companies right now.

“Be authentic” is the most common brand directive right now and the least useful.

Authentic is a buzzword, truly. No one seems to be able to say what “authentic” means for their own company, so team start pointing at other brands doing things that feel real and try to mimic. Literally the opposite of authenticity.

Then it’s cute for a hot second until the strategy starts to fall apart because it was all fake and borrowed. They get the surface stuff right (tone, content style, vulnerability cues, pacing) but they miss the core goodness that made all that feel real for the brand they’re copying (ahem, sorry I mean “inspired by”). Meanwhile, none of the decisions, constraints, or incentives have changed and people still don’t know who the brand authentically is.

What this signals

Why it matters, and where things are headed.

When “authentic” isn’t defined specifically for *THAT BRAND* because that’s what authenticity means, the team is constantly chasing whatever new trend someone else is doing because they have no sense of self to keep the brand grounded.

It looks like this:

• Progress stalls because teams get stuck in decision loops

• Messaging/design/creative/whatever keeps changing on a whim

• Marketing is asked to “make it more human” but not given constraints

• Leaders reference other brands instead of their own strategy

• Consistency becomes a goal, but no one can define what should be consistent

Your decision model

A simple framework to apply in your work.

Instead of asking, “Does this sound authentic?” ask three more useful questions:

1. Does this sound like us today, right now? Not aspirational. Who the brand is at its best, under everyday constraints, against real competitors, focused on promises only you can own, with a personality that can be observed in your process, with the team, on the website, and so on.

2. Would we still say this if it made something harder? (Or if some side opportunity shows up that makes us stray?) Authenticity shows up in tradeoffs, when you have to make hard choices. If a message only works when it’s convenient, it’s probably performative or aspirational.

3. Can this hold up across teams and channels? If Sales, Product, and Leadership can’t use the same language without rewriting it, it’s not grounded enough to scale. I cannot stress the importance of including voices across *more teams than marketing and leadership* when developing brand strategy.

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Inside the work

How I’ve handled it with a client + the template we used.

We ran into this exact issue with Volo City.