Advertisers and politicians often say the importance of what you say and do is a matter of perspective. But in brand building, truth is singular and concrete, a cornerstone. So why are some marketing pundits clouding the waters by promoting authenticity as the primary driver of brands? It all seems like semantics to me.
First, brand authenticity is itself an outcome—the result of continuous, clear, and consistent efforts to deliver truth in every touch point. Second, a brand can be authentic in either its positive or its negative character. That is the main problem: Not all authentic brands are honest. In the age of corporate scandals and lost retirement funds, a brand can be an authentic scoundrel.
When a brand stays on message and delivers what is expected, there really is not much difference between truth and authenticity. In fact, it’s a bit like trying to answer the “which came first” question. While truth and authenticity are both essential to branding. they are table stakes and takeaways, not strategies for building your brand. How you deliver these assets to get closer to customers is the real art and science of branding.
In my experience, the constant search for relevance is key to building a successful brand. Relevance comes from market focus and a symbiotic relationship between understanding and caring about customers, partners, and suppliers and staying true to one’s moral compass. If your brand can achieve physical or emotional relevance through your words, actions, or behaviors, it can form an implicit renewable bond with your audience.
This is how brand is born: supply meeting demand with sustainable relevance and differentiated results—a living promise to perform in a predictable and valued way.
Three keys to being relevant
When building a brand, relevance means aligning your culture, processes, and communications around what matters to your customers. It’s a continuous process—derived from a committed, long-term brand and business strategy—that requires you to listen to and respond to pivotal stakeholders while managing evolving expectations. Bringing us full circle, the process starts with truth and ends with authenticity. Let’s look at the keys to relevance through the actions and experiences of a few well-known brands.
1) Be honest with yourself. When President Clinton lied to the American people about Monica Lewinsky, he did not so much harm his authenticity (in other words, his political stature and place in U.S. history) as change the public’s desire to wholeheartedly support his brand. In many respects, the event actually helped Clinton to rise above authenticity to icon status. For half of the populace, the Bill Clinton brand became more like them: accessible, human, frail, forgivable. For the rest, he crossed an irrevocable line of trust that he could never uncross. In the years since Clinton left office, his brand has regained value–not by harking back to tainted authenticity but, as was the case with other politicians before him, via well-placed efforts to reposition himself through newfound honesty and relevant good works.
2) Demonstrate goodwill to others. In the world of branding, we’ve seen a similar example with much different repercussions at Ford Motor Co. and Firestone. A century’s efforts culminated in iconic status for these great, authentic American brands, only to be undermined by a single unspoken flaw that resulted in customer deaths and violated the public trust. More so for Firestone than Ford, the issue of faulty tires should have been a primary object of concern. Instead, fear of repercussions prevented immediate action and demonstrated a lack of goodwill.
3) Be committed to market needs and delivering value. On the other end of the spectrum, Apple is a textbook brand-building example based on a holistic focus on finding relevance. The basis of Apple’s recent reemergence has not been its authenticity as much as its dogmatic attention to what customers value and to meeting these expectations–all in the context of Apple’s promise of simplicity and ease of use.
Goal: customer experience management
Apple and other great brands know that relevance comes from understanding market needs and satisfying these needs in a genuine, unique, and enduring way. They also know that a terrific way to measure and build a brand’s relevance over time is through customer experience management. This means creating a baseline score of familiarity and favorability and then working to meet customer expectations through effective product design, delivery, and service. Only through this qualitative and quantitative approach to achieving relevance can company leaders identify and firm up brand weaknesses, exceed what is expected, and truly differentiate their brand in the marketplace.
So next time you find yourself wondering about which matters more to your brand, truth or authenticity, remember the lessons of WorldCom, Enron, and Adelphia, or just look around at Mark Foley and the ousted HP board members. They remind us that authenticity, by itself, is a house of cards in the world of executive missteps and misdemeanors. Brand building means philosophically—and in practice—being truthful to oneself and to one’s major stakeholders, partners, and customers, seeking relevance and making promises you can keep. The rest is all semantics.
Patrick Ohlin is brand director of CoreBrand, a New York-based branding agency.