Authenticity means realizing there's no such thing as brand perfection. Brand perfection is dead. Some gems from this post by Douglas Karr:- It’s no longer the choice of the brand manager or the CMO to maintain the integrity of the brand. It’s now the responsibility of every employee in the organization.
- If you want to kill a bad story in a search engine results page, you need to work much harder as a company to make some good stories make the results page instead. Much, much harder.
- The good news is that consumers don’t expect perfection anymore… but they do expect honesty.
- We can’t control the message unless we can live up to the expectations of what we wish our brand to portray. We can’t cover up our faults anymore, we have to be open about them.
Jeremiah Owyang summed it up quite nicely over a year ago:What does Authentic, Transparent, or being Human look like?
- Training and entrusting employees to build real relationships using these tools
- Admitting when you’re wrong
- Asking the community for help, working with the community to build better products
- Showing your strengths –and weaknesses –in a public forum
- Showing more of unique side of the employees (that you invested in) in addition to your products, technology, and services
- Realizing the brand is actually owned by the community and not just the MarCom brand police
Authenticity means telling the truth. Maybe allowing everyone to tell the truth.
What else might it mean?
[photo credits]
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1 comments:
Great post! It makes me wonder if maybe we need to move away from "controlling the message"--which creates natural bottlenecks and a lot of effort to keep everyone on exactly the same page, with (in some cases) exactly the same wording--to more of an organic model of "living the message"--where everyone buys into what the brand looks like and tries their best to live it, both online and offline.
Admittedly, I'm not a marketing expert, but I think customers will respond to the latter, and it could also be a more effective approach when you're trying to move at Internet speed.
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