In response to my post if creating shareholder value excludes authenticity, Tom Asacker, wonders if consumers care one way or the other if companies are authentic or not. Seth Godin writes:
Consumers are begging to be sold on the authentic. The easiest way to do that, of course, is to be authentic. And yet, ever since they replaced the sugar in Coke with corn syrup, who knows any more... Being inauthentic is tricky, unpredictable and often wrong. But it also works.
The fact is, most of the people want to be fooled, just about all of the time.
I question Seth on a number of points:
Either consumers want authentic or they want to be fooled. Which one is it?
Which fact proves that people want to be fooled? I would really like to know.
I personally hate being fooled or being treated like a fool. So I do not understand the statement that most people want to be fooled most of the time. Is that a conscious choice? In some situations? Sometimes? Or an unconscious acceptance that being fooled is just a fact of life? As long as a person doesn’t know that he is being fooled, ignorance is bliss? It must be, because knowing that you are fooled makes you feel like a fool. I think consumers don’t want to have that feeling. It is the feeling that someone has gotten the better of you..
Maybe it is the wish of the consumer to be fooled that has driven businesses to the lack of authenticity? I don’t think this is congruent with the power that business has or the lack of power consumer may feel.
Authenticity by consumer demand, claims Seth Godin, Asacker wonders if consumers care one way or the other. I think they do not necessarily explicitly care about authenticity, but they care about the consequences of businesses not being authentic. These consequences can be bad, like: Organizations not living up to their promise, Poor service, Poor products, Crappy apologies when something does go wrong, Poor leadership, Phoney corporate social responsibility, Weak brands. Weak non-performing organizational cultures, Enron, Ahold. The list can go on and on………..So while consumers may not demand authenticity per se, they demand the outcome of authenticity. Especially if experience is what a company sells to its customers. Fellow customers are part of the experience and authenticity is needed to pick the customers that both enjoy and enhance the experience.
Being authentic isn’t easy and becomes more difficult with the number of employees in an organization, number of different geographical locations of the organization, number of business units etc. etc. Besides, if it was easy to be authentic, we would not be discussing it now. Authenticity would then be a given.
Authenticity to me is a component of Corporate Social Responsibility. The latter is not possible without the first. Surely, Seth Godin doesn’t preach corporate social unresponsibility or suggest that consumers would want that that type of behavior from business?
I think authenticity is important, but it is also a very difficult concept to reconcile with the way business has been done.