Marketing Leadership minus the hype 3: Stop performing authenticity

Posted by Mike O'Brien on May 27, 2026 in Postcards from the digital frontier | Leave a comment

The case for treating brand behaviour as an investment rather than a communications strategy

There is a version of authenticity that most marketing organisations are very good at. It involves carefully articulated value statements, brand purpose frameworks that run to thirty slides, social media presences calibrated to sound human and occasionally self-deprecating, and campaign work that foregrounds real customers, real employees, and real stories. It is executed with considerable skill and, in many cases, genuine conviction.

It is also, increasingly, the thing audiences trust least.

Not because they are cynical about brands in the abstract. But because they have spent years accumulating the experience of watching what organisations say about themselves diverge from what those organisations actually do, and they have developed a sensitivity to that distance that no amount of authentic-sounding content can fully paper over.

The belief that authenticity is primarily a communications challenge is one of the most expensive misunderstandings in modern marketing. It has produced a generation of brand work that reaches for emotional resonance while the operational reality beneath it remains unchanged, and in doing so it has quietly made the underlying problem worse. Every piece of purpose-led communications that rings hollow to an audience that has had a different experience with the actual organisation does not merely fail. It damages. It adds to the accumulated evidence that this brand cannot be trusted to mean what it says.

The more uncomfortable truth is that authenticity cannot be communicated into existence. It can only be built, slowly, operationally, and largely outside the marketing department’s direct control.

What authenticity actually is

For leadership and strategy purposes, a more useful definition than most organisations are working with is this:

Authenticity is the sustained coherence between a brand’s stated identity, organisational behaviour, customer experience, and long-term decisions.

Every word in that definition is doing work. Sustained, because a single act of coherence is not authenticity: it is good PR, and audiences have learned to recognise the difference. Coherence, because the test is not perfection but legibility: can audiences form reliable expectations of this brand, and are those expectations met consistently enough to justify trust? Organisational behaviour, because this explicitly includes how a company treats its employees, its suppliers, and its communities, not just the customers it is actively trying to impress. And long-term decisions, because authenticity is ultimately revealed under pressure, when short-term commercial incentives conflict with stated values and the organisation has to choose.

Brands built on this kind of coherence tend to generate higher trust, stronger loyalty, greater pricing power, and more forgiving customer relationships during periods of difficulty. Not because they are morally superior to other brands, and not because they communicate more effectively. But because they are believable. Audiences who have learned that a brand reliably does what it says on the tin will do extend it something rare and valuable: the benefit of the doubt.

That is not a soft outcome. In an environment where content is abundant, attention is scarce, and audiences are calibrated to detect inconsistency, believability may be the most durable competitive asset a brand can hold.

Why the distance is widening

Audiences have never had more tools to detect the distance between what brands say and what they do.

Social media surfaces it in real time. Review platforms aggregate the lived experience of millions of customer interactions into a permanent, searchable audit of how a brand actually behaves. Employee transparency sites (think Glassdoor) allow the internal culture, the way an organisation treats the people who deliver the customer experience, to become public knowledge. Investigative journalism has developed sophisticated methods for testing corporate claims against corporate conduct. And the cumulative weight of individual experience, shared through networks that reach further and faster than any brand channel, creates a distributed fact-checking operation that no communications strategy can consistently outrun.

The strategic implication is straightforward but still widely underestimated: in this environment, the distance between what a brand says and what it does is not a reputational risk to be managed. It is the primary reputational risk. And it grows, not shrinks, the more it is addressed through communications rather than behaviour.

What makes this particularly acute right now is the intersection with AI-generated content. As the volume of brand communications continues to expand, accelerated by tools that make production faster and cheaper than ever before, the signal-to-noise problem for audiences intensifies. The brands that will cut through are not those producing the most content. They are those whose content is backed by conduct that audiences have already experienced as consistent. Coherence becomes the amplifier that makes communications investment worthwhile. Without it, more content is simply more noise.

The structural trap

Here is where the problem becomes genuinely difficult, rather than merely difficult to admit.

If authenticity requires sustained coherence across stated identity, behaviour, customer experience, and long-term decisions, then the following are all authenticity problems, and none of them are solved by better communications.

A company that celebrates innovation publicly while internally punishing the failure that genuine innovation requires. A brand that claims to value its customers while operating service processes designed primarily to reduce cost rather than resolve problems. An organisation that publishes environmental commitments while its procurement decisions remain structurally unchanged. A business that describes its people as its greatest asset while its marketing team reports the highest burnout rate in the building.

In each case, the disconnect exists not because the communications were badly written but because the behaviour they describe is not actually occurring. And that behaviour is owned not by the marketing department but by the CEO, the CFO, the chief people officer, the head of operations, and ultimately the board.

This creates a trap that most senior marketing leaders will recognise immediately. The investment most organisations make in brand is almost entirely concentrated in the stated identity layer: brand strategy, messaging architecture, campaign production, content, and social presence. These are things marketing can control, brief, and produce. The behavioural layers that actually determine whether audiences experience a brand as coherent, product quality, service delivery, pricing integrity, employment practice, operational decision-making, are owned by functions where marketing has real but limited influence.

The CMO investing primarily in communications while these behavioural conditions remain unbuilt is not building brand equity. They are decorating a problem. The investment looks productive because it generates visible output: campaigns, content, coverage, award entries. But it does not compound. The moment communications stops, or the conduct becomes too visible to paper over, the equity disappears, because it was never built on anything structural.

The compounding return argument

This is why authenticity is better understood as an investment than as a strategy.

Investment implies three things that are all relevant here: an upfront cost that is real and sometimes painful, a return that is not immediate, and a compounding effect over time that makes the long-horizon position significantly more valuable than the short one.

Closing the distance between what a brand says and what it does involves costs that go well beyond the marketing budget. It may require changing service processes that are cheaper the way they are. It may require employment practices that improve experience but increase headcount cost. It may require declining short-term revenue opportunities that conflict with stated values: the sponsorship deal that is commercially attractive but reputationally inconsistent, the pricing decision that maximises margin but undermines the trust relationship with loyal customers. None of these decisions are cost-free, which is precisely why so few organisations make them systematically.

The return on that investment, for organisations that do make it, is durable in a way that communications spend alone cannot match, and its most concrete expression is crisis resilience. The brands that recover fastest from reputational damage are rarely those with the most sophisticated crisis communications. They are those that had coherence credit to draw on when things went wrong: a body of prior experience telling audiences that this brand is fundamentally what it says it is, and that one failure does not define it. That resilience is invisible until you need it, which is exactly why it is so chronically underbuilt. It cannot be created in the moment of crisis. It can only be drawn down from what was deposited over years of consistent conduct.

A growing number of organisations have understood this instinctively and built accordingly. They are not united by sector, size, or communications sophistication. They are united by a single discipline: the consistent willingness to make operational decisions that their stated values require, even when those decisions are commercially inconvenient.

The coherence credit they have accumulated over time is visible not in their brand tracking scores but in the durability of their customer relationships, the quality of the talent they attract, and the speed with which their audiences extend them the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong. Each illustrates a different dimension of what sustained coherence actually looks like in practice.

Patagonia Coherence between environmental claims and operational decisions enacted over decades: repairing rather than replacing products, donating revenue to environmental causes, restricting corporate bulk orders that conflicted with its values, and in 2022 transferring company ownership to a trust dedicated to fighting climate change. The brand’s authenticity is not communicated. It is demonstrated through decisions that cost money. That is the sustained coherence between stated identity and long-term decisions that the authenticity definition requires, and it is why Patagonia’s customer relationships survive controversy in ways that brands managing the same gap through communications cannot replicate.

IKEA Democratic design as a sustained operational commitment rather than a brand positioning. The principle that well-designed furniture should be affordable has governed product development, supply chain decisions, and store design consistently since the company’s founding. The gap between claim and conduct that undermines most brand purpose is structurally difficult at IKEA because the purpose is built into the business model rather than applied to it. That is coherence between stated identity and organisational behaviour at its most durable: not a values statement sitting above the operation but a founding principle running through it.

Monzo Transparency and customer-centricity enacted through product decisions rather than communications. Publishing its roadmap publicly, explaining product decisions in plain language, and building customer service infrastructure around genuine problem resolution rather than cost reduction. The brand’s tone of voice follows its operational behaviour rather than preceding it. That sequencing, behaviour first and communications second, is precisely the coherence between organisational behaviour and customer experience the definition identifies as the foundation of genuine brand trust.

Basecamp Opinionated and consistent on how software companies should be built and run, publishing its internal practices, disagreeing publicly with industry consensus on growth at all costs, and maintaining a product philosophy that has not shifted with market pressure. Where most technology companies state values and then make decisions that contradict them under commercial pressure, Basecamp has consistently made the decisions its stated values require even when those decisions were commercially inconvenient. That is the pressure test the authenticity piece argues reveals what organisations actually value, answered consistently over time.

Wieden and Kennedy Creative integrity as an operational commitment: an independent agency that has consistently declined work conflicting with its creative standards and maintained genuine authorship over the work it produces rather than subordinating creative judgement to client preference. The coherence here is between stated identity as a creative organisation and the long-term decisions that identity requires, including the decision to walk away from revenue when accepting it would compromise the thing the organisation claims to stand for. That willingness to bear the cost of coherence is what distinguishes genuine epistemic authority from its imitation.

By the way, this isn’t a new phenomenon. The Avis story is worth examining here because it predates the entire brand purpose era and yet illustrates the coherence argument more cleanly than almost any contemporary example. When Bill Bernbach’s agency created “We’re number two, we try harder” in 1962, the line worked not because it was cleverly written but because it was structurally true. Avis was genuinely number two. It genuinely had to try harder to survive.

The stated identity was coherent with the organisational reality in a way that required no gap management because there was no gap. The company had been losing money for thirteen consecutive years before the campaign launched. The commitment to trying harder was not a values statement applied to the business from the outside. It was a description of what the business had to do to exist.

That operational truth is what gave the line its extraordinary durability: it ran for fifty years not because the creative idea was refreshed but because the underlying coherence between claim and conduct was never broken. Avis could not afford to stop trying harder, which meant audiences never had to recalibrate their expectations of it.

What the modern brand purpose movement has largely failed to replicate is that structural integrity. The most compelling authenticity is not chosen. It is built into the conditions of the organisation’s existence in a way that makes the alternative, the gap between claim and conduct, genuinely difficult to sustain.

The tenure problem

There is an honest systemic reason why this investment is undervalued, and it connects to the leadership argument the first piece in this series established.

As that piece documented, CMO tenure at Fortune 500 companies has fallen to under four years, the shortest of any C-suite role, and fewer than 60% of those companies now have a marketing executive reporting directly to the CEO. A marketing leader operating within that window has a strong rational incentive to invest in things that move visible metrics before their tenure ends. Building the behavioural coherence that produces genuine, compounding brand resilience is a multi-year project whose returns are unlikely to be fully measurable within a single leadership tenure. The investments required to close operational disconnects may actively reduce short-term efficiency metrics. And the cross-functional influence required to make the case for those investments is precisely the kind of authority the CMO role is losing, not gaining.

This is not a failure of individual leadership. Short tenure, narrowing mandate, and quarterly reporting cycles are built into the incentive structure of most large organisations in ways that are directly incompatible with long-horizon brand investment. Until that mismatch is resolved, organisations will continue producing brand investment that talks about authenticity while the conditions for it remain unbuilt.

Four questions worth asking

The following are not a framework. They are questions that tend to surface where an organisation’s authenticity investment actually sits versus where it needs to be.

The coherence audit. Where are the three largest distances between what your brand claims to stand for and what it actually delivers in customer experience, employee experience, or operational decision-making? Who owns those disconnects, not in the communications sense but in the operational sense? And what would closing them actually require?

The pressure test. When your organisation last faced a significant commercial conflict between its stated values and a short-term financial decision, what happened? The honest answer tells you more about your brand’s authentic standing than any tracking study. Brands reveal what they actually value not in their communications but in their choices under pressure.

The investment audit. What proportion of your total brand investment goes into stating identity versus building the behavioural conditions that make that identity credible? If the answer is more than 80% on the stating side, which it is in most organisations, the portfolio is misallocated relative to where audience trust is actually formed.

The mandate question. Do you have genuine influence over the functions and decisions that determine whether your brand behaves coherently: product, service, people, pricing, operations? If not, what is the minimum cross-functional mandate required to make authentic brand building possible? And is the current leadership structure willing to provide it?

The compounding advantage

The organisations that will find this hardest to act on are also, not coincidentally, the ones most at risk from those that do.

Authentic standing, built through sustained coherence over time, produces something that cannot be replicated quickly by a competitor with a larger communications budget: earned trust at scale. And earned trust, unlike the attention generated by any individual campaign, does not need to be repurchased each time it is used. It accumulates. It extends into new categories, new audiences, and new periods of difficulty. It makes every subsequent communications investment more effective because it gives audiences a reason to believe what they are being told.

The organisations that begin closing the distance between their stated identity and their actual conduct earliest will be the hardest to catch. Not because authenticity is a moat that competitors cannot cross, but because the compounding nature of coherence credit means the lead grows faster than it appears to from the outside. By the time the advantage becomes visible in brand tracking or commercial performance, it has typically been building for years.

That is the investment case for authenticity, stated plainly, without the language of purpose or values or social responsibility that has made this conversation so easy to dismiss. It is a long-horizon commercial argument about where durable competitive advantage comes from in an environment where content is cheap, attention is scarce, and audiences are better equipped than ever to tell the difference between what a brand says it is and what it actually does.

The question is not whether authentic brand building matters. The evidence on that is consistent and growing. The question is whether the leadership structure, the investment mandate, and the patience exist inside your organisation to build it seriously, and whether the people responsible for making that case have the cross-functional authority to be heard when they do.

Further reading

Edelman Trust Barometer – edelman.com/trust | Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow | Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage – tablegroup.com | Harvard Business Review on brand authenticity – hbr.org | Rory Sutherland on behavioural brand value – ted.com/speakers/rory_sutherland | Marketing Week on CMO tenure and influence