Authenticity is a Con: (Provocations) by Peter York

Author:Peter York
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781849548489
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2014-11-26T13:00:00+00:00

Love you lots,

An Authentic Marketeer

They can’t mean that, can they?

We all know that the food industry lobbyists have been paid millions to get to Whitehall to delay and dilute precise food-labelling legislation. (My fantasy is of talking computer chips in sweetie and crisp packaging that scream ‘Type 2 diabetes and chafing thighs followed by amputation if you even touch me’ at waddling blobs.) And we know that tobacco lobbyists have fought the threat of plain packaging for cigarettes everywhere in the world – they’re actually trialling it in Australia now33 – so it can’t exactly mean owning up to everything.

Authenticity in marketing isn’t quite the same as openness, which, literally translated, means your business should put it all out there. What everyone’s paid in your organisation; what board-level expenses really cover; what your creative accountancy really does; what’s off the balance sheet; what you’re doing in the Cayman Islands. And the rest. But that can’t be quite right either. (As a ’90s PR tycoon once told me: ‘Tell the truth; tell it like this.’)

What the new authenticity and transparency raps have in common is that they’re bought into business from specialists, up to a point. In the eternally positive worldview of people like me who sell ‘business services’, they’re an opportunity to turn a trick. Just as there are people around to tell you how to be authentic, how to manage it, so there are people – corporate and financial PRs – who’ll do your transparency for you, tell you what to own up to as a trade-off against keeping the rest secret. It’s like ‘crisis management’ when the plane’s crashed or you’ve poisoned half of South America by accident. Same people, same techniques. Or, to take a slightly earlier business enthusiasm, Corporate Social Responsibility, which was such a time-consuming bore that you had to get those PR/lobbyist types in again to make you sound corporately responsible too – lovely initiatives with schools in Hackney; middle managers fun-running for charity. Enron, the biggest bankruptcy in America’s history, was a brilliant corporate citizen.

In America, the authenticity rap comes from a long line of store-front religion. It’s small-town, small business stuff. It’s a tradition that was originally a world away from big government and global corporations. But new technology has taken sharing onto another much bigger stage – social media and the urge to global reciprocal confidences. The drive to share, to be open, even ‘vulnerable’, is central to the authenticity story. ‘Closed’, ‘defended’ people, by implication, are inauthentic, they’re not so much disciplined or stoical, they’re repressed. And the idea of repression is central to the psychological crusade, to talking therapies and the ideas about personalities and how they’re shaped.

The argument goes that what all authenticity shills describe as ‘social pressures’ cut people off from their true selves by constantly urging them to live up to inauthentic, impossible role models. Their ‘alternative’ view is of the elemental self, the soul, the source of authentic behaviour, consistent and unchanging. What this line

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.