Who Do You Love?

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There were compelling reasons to send Juan Valdez off to the old folks home for advertising's ex-celebs. The fictional coffee-growing icon had been featured in ads for decades, helping establish "100% Colombian coffee" as a global brand. But Juan wasn't aging well. Recent TV spots showed him surfing with his faithful mule, Conchita, and popping up in kitchen pantries. While humorous, the ads reinforced the notion that Juan had become a bit of a joke.

Yet at the eleventh hour, the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia decided that introducing a new, younger "Juan in a million" would be better than retiring him. A brand consultancy in Portland, Oregon, called Character advised that Juan's appeal--humble but uncompromising, dedicated to the hard work of raising coffee by hand--could still be valuable. "Juan Valdez taps into a fundamental human truth," contends Jim Hardison, Character's creative director, "that the things we savor the most are the hardest earned." People emotionally connect with Juan because he seems authentic, Hardison reminded the federation, and authenticity is a priceless commodity.

In an increasingly shiny, fabricated world of spun messages and concocted experiences--where nearly everything we encounter is created for consumption--elevating a brand above the fray requires an uncommon mix of creativity and discipline. And nowhere do you see the challenge more starkly illustrated than in the quest for authenticity. "Authenticity is the benchmark against which all brands are now judged," notes John Grant in The New Marketing Manifesto. Or as Seth Godin quips in Permission Marketing: "If you can fake authenticity, the rest will take care of itself."

Overloaded by sales pitches, consumers are gravitating toward brands that they sense are true and genuine. Hunger for the authentic is all around us. You can see it in the way millions are drawn to mission-driven products like organic foods. It's there in the sex-without-guilt way people respond to the footloose joy of BMW's Mini. You see it in the tribes of "i-centered" buyers who value individuality and independence--and whom Apple has so cleverly cultivated through its iMacs and iPods.

Yet our sense of what's "real" in this post-postmodern world takes on all kinds of strangely distorted shapes and guises, as if it's reflected back at us from a swirl of fun-house mirrors. A fictional coffee grower, it turns out, has lasting resonance. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, with its hoaxy newscasts, comes across as authentic in large part because it self-consciously declares itself to be fake. A coffeehouse chain like Starbucks can rise to prominence by creating an imitation of Milan's espresso bars--and then be pilloried (by its own chairman, among others) for not staying true to that fabricated experience. What's authentic is not always real, and what's real is not always what it seems.

Playing the authenticity game in a sophisticated way has become a requirement for every marketer, because the opposite of real isn't fake--it's cynicism. When a brand asserts authenticity in a clumsy way, it quickly breeds distrust or, at the very least, disinterest. Just remember Coca-Cola's attempt to muck with the Real Thing's original formula--and the calamitous launch of New Coke. Or consider the plight of Levi's, at one time the very epitome of an authentic American brand, which became increasingly out-of-date to new lovers of denim.

Both the promise and the peril of "getting real" are, indeed, very real. "Authentic" is derived from the Greek authentikós, which means "original." And unfortunately, there's no recipe for originality. Each brand must build its own primary source code for the authentic. Still, there are some larger lessons (and pitfalls) that anyone charged with overseeing a brand would be wise to consider. What follows is a series of questions that every brand, at some point in its evolution, will have to wrestle with if it hopes to be, in the immortal words of Smokey Robinson, "really, really real."

What does it take to be authentic?