Who Do You Love?

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No business has confronted this challenge more urgently than Starbucks. As chairman Howard Schultz lamented to upper management in a bluntly worded missive on Valentine's Day, the company's rapid growth has "led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience," and the company's stores "no longer have the soul of the past." The Seattle-based coffee juggernaut gained its authentic mien as the quintessential "third place" (after home and the workplace), where people could linger for hours over "grandes" of java. Yet today, stores are overrun with a clutter of CDs, coffeemakers, puzzles, bagged beans, and more. The outposts have become as much retail space as meeting place.

"It will be another decade before Starbucks becomes as meaningless as Chock Full o'Nuts," jokes Patrick Hanlon, CEO of the brand consultancy Thinktopia. Despite Schultz's impassioned outburst, Starbucks has not retreated from its previously stated aim to eventually establish 40,000 retail outlets around the world. "As it lurches slowly toward ubiquity," Hanlon notes, "it moves further and further away from authenticity."

Yet it doesn't have to be that way for all big brands. Another colossus from the Pacific Northwest, Nike, has demonstrated that growth and authenticity are not wholly incompatible. A framed black-and-white photograph that hangs in CEO Mark Parker's corner office in Beaverton, Oregon, reveals one of the secrets to how Nike keeps it real even as it has grown to more than 28,000 employees and a portfolio of 13,000 products. The portrait is of Bill Bowerman, the legendary University of Oregon track coach and Nike cofounder, who died in 1999. "If you talk to a lot of designers around here, they'll say they've got Bill sitting on their shoulder, speaking up for the athlete," Parker says.

By taking "deep dives" into various sports tribes and using the resulting insights to become more relevant--and therefore more authentic--Nike has maintained a renegade edge. As Parker tells it, not so long ago the company believed it was "too big, too corporate" to be accepted by the skateboarding culture. But as the market grew to 15 million skaters who generate $3 billion in annual sales, Nike plunged in. Parker assembled a Nike Skateboarding team that lived and breathed skate. It worked with hard-core skaters to develop a shoe, dubbed the Dunk, customized for skateboarding. It signed hot young skaters to represent the new Nike SB division. And it brought in maverick graphic artists to tell their stories on the canvas of Dunk shoes. To some die-hard skaters, Nike may still be a wannabe, but it has managed to pick off a sizable chunk of customers. The antidote to size and ubiquity--for Nike, at least--has been to go vertical. "As we get bigger," Parker says, "we get deeper."

Can you be authentic when you're trying to be authentic?

The first time you hear a quartet of Cold Stone Creamery's ice-cream slingers, in response to a tip, warble a verse of "Sprinkle, sprinkle candy bar, this is what our mix-ins are," it feels both silly and endearing. But when the same bit of showmanship is replayed on repeat visits, it comes off as shtick. It turns out that Cold Stone, the No. 3 ice-cream chain in the United States with more than 1,300 stores, auditions prospective scoopers to see who can carry a tune that will amuse the kids and ultimately move more mint chocolate. Although dishing up a little dazzle with its sundaes might help Cold Stone achieve its goal of toppling Dairy Queen and becoming the nation's big cherry by 2010, mandated singing feels phony.

The crooning Cold Stoners share the same plight as Wal-Mart's smiley greeters. Coerced by corporate fiat, their "warmth" can wear out its welcome and feel contrived. That's one reason why we so often distrust the big-box retailers and chain stores: Their take on what's authentic springs straight from the company manual. Authenticity is necessary, but it cannot be compelled.

And therein lies an authentic paradox: A brand doesn't feel real when it overtly tries to make itself real. To the hypertargeted consumer, baldly billboarding a brand's message smacks of insincerity. General Motors' "Our Country, Our Truck" campaign for Chevrolet's Silverado offers a striking example. Silverado's TV commercials, which this past fall were in heavy rotation on NFL games, featured clichéd images of he-man Americana--rugged factory workers, proud firefighters, and the truck itself, lumbering through a golden field of grain--backed by John Mellencamp's song "Our Country," an ode to America's can-do spirit. Media critics assailed the ads, in part because the original spots flashed iconic images of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, all in the service of selling trucks.