Be Boldly Authentic | What Authenticity Is and Why it Matters for Your Brand

To have a successful brand, it is important to build a genuine relationship with your customers. And the key to a genuine connection is authenticity.

However, sometimes people sacrifice authenticity for a mistaken sense of professionalism. Too many marketers seem to assume that customers want to see something overly polished and buttoned up, when often, customers are hoping to connect with something real. Ironically, the more a brand strives to look professional, the more plastic and cold it becomes, and the further it distances itself from forming a genuine connection with its intended audience.

This episode I’ll help you identify these barriers to connecting with your audience so you can properly remove them, and build a more authentic, meaningful brand.

You’ll learn

• What authenticity is

• Why authenticity determines trustworthiness

• Why professionalism can look unprofessional

• Tips to craft authentic content

• Words of caution when being “authentic”

Key terms

• Authenticity - Being transparent and honest about who you are and what you do. When there is no dissonance between your message (what you say), and your offer (what you do).

Episode Transcript

Hey. How's it going, everybody? In this episode, we're talking about why authenticity matters and then how to make steps towards building a more authentic brand and creating more authentic content. OK. Essentially, if you want to create a genuine connection with your audience, if you want to strike a an emotional connection with them, one that where they understand that you are earnest, that you actually care about them, that genuine this requires that genuine connection, rather requires that you communicate a genuine attitude that that you are seen as being genuine in your intent.

Right. Because when we're talking about authenticity, what we're really kind of getting at is your intent, the intent behind what you're doing. And and do you really care? Right. I mean, granted, you don't have to be authentically like a caring, authentic person. To be completely honest. I'd rather pick an authentically selfish company than a fake company, like a fake caring company, some company that's trying to convince me that they care, but I know they don't.

As opposed to one that's just straight up on us about that. They don't care Right. I'd rather be with the one that's actually honest about what they're doing. Right. So what do we mean by authenticity? Authenticity. Is essentially like your you're transparent. You know, you're you're honest about what you who you are and what you do that there's not a dissonance between what you say and what you do, that there's not a dissonance between your messaging and and your marketing and then the overall experience that a customer's going to engage with your brand, that there's not a difference between what you say about your culture and what your culture actually is.

And you get what I'm saying. It's like it's like you're you're ultimately matching who you are with what you say. You're you're walking the walk and talking the talk It's important for your business because this ultimately is a very big deciding factor for customers. You know, I mean, ultimately, we're trying to get customers through that process of knowing, liking and trusting.

And the biggest builder of trust is going to be whether or not, you know, like you are genuine. Right. Like like my evaluation of of like how I evaluate, evaluate and attribute trust to people is like are they going to do what they say they're going to do? Right. Like, are they going to show up how they said they were going to show up?

Or are they putting on a front? OK, so are they a real person or are they a phony person? This is the same exact way that we are measuring and judging companies. We apply the same social codes to our one to one relationships that we do to relating with businesses and relating with companies and with brands. I don't really think our mind has the ability to really distinguish between between those two.

Right. That's going to come off as mildly insulting. Right. Obviously, you understand that like a brand is an organization and a person is an individual. But as we're thinking about like how we actually relate to to each of those entities, if you will, like we kind of relate to them the exact same. Like, this goes into my philosophy of marketing is simply relationship building.

Like we are trying to present our brand in a way that basically forms a strong relationship with our customer as quickly as possible. OK. And and so we want to remove any friction and any hurdles that are going to get in the way of us creating that genuine emotional connection with our audience. And the biggest hurdle to remove is the fear of authenticity what holds companies back from fully embracing authenticity is fear And it's it's often coupled with the fear of of looking unprofessional.

And so it's this this fear of wanting to appear professional and and thinking that if we can reach this level of professionalism, that that is what's going to communicate the assurance, credibility and trust that we need to establish with our audience OK. And and therefore, being open and transparent and human is actually what we want to avoid. Because that has the tendency of looking unprofessional.

OK. I hope I've done a good enough job of explaining why Showing your humanity that that emotional side is actually what's important. Because what happens when we actually strive to be professional is we start getting overly buttoned up. OK. So we start measuring our words. Now, I'm not saying just fly off the handle and say whatever the heck you want to say.

OK. There is wisdom in measuring words, but you kind of start to do it at an extreme. OK. Where were you? You overanalyze. That's a good way of saying it. You overanalyze what you were trying to communicate and what you're trying to say. You overstress culture, your language and and you over structure it to such a degree that we end up in the corporate jargon area where we're talking about like optimizing our processes and creating solutions when really what we're selling is like like printer paper.

Right. But we're going to talk about that like it's a solution. OK. You get what I'm saying? It's like some of this stuff we over in engineer. What we're doing to where we literally confuse who we are because we've gotten so far away from just being straight up and, and open and, and human and speaking like a human that we've overcomplicated it by trying to become too professional During the pandemic, I had a client send me a video that they had created using their cell phone.

That's not a knock on them. I'll get back around to that but they had they had shot this video on their cell phone and they were trying to to raise more support. They're basically they provide food to homeless people. So over the pandemic, it made it very difficult for them to continue to provide food to the homeless because of, you know, like we had a tag on pandemic going on.

You know, it was it was a bit scary at that moment. So they were trying to raise a little support to continue to to to provide food to the homeless. And so they shot this video on their cell phone. They sent over the video to me. And I took one look at it. I'm like, oh, God. Like this this is not going to raise any money.

Like, no one's going to donate to this because they were trying too hard to be professional. And so I'm not saying that it was a bad thing that they shot on their cell phone, but they they they basically they had written themselves a script. They were already like really, really like, OK, we need to stand up straight. We need to stand up tall on camera.

And they're reading their script like this because this is how you read a script. When you're on camera, you get what I'm saying. Like, and that was the whole video. And even though the message was attempting to be heartfelt because they had written it as a script and then they're reading that script and they're attempting to look professional and they're doing the things they're essentially like they were emulating or copying what you think you're expected action is for something that would be professional, right?

You set up the camera in front of you, you sit in front of the camera, you would present it as a professional would. Right.

But that each thing is attempting to hit the mark, but missing the mark because it's providing yet another psychological hurdle in front of us to where we're now trying too hard. We're trying to be professional, but we're not a professional actor. Right. And we're trying to get a message across and we're trying to make sure that we've got the language that we need to use in order to get our message across.

But because we're reading the language right. Like it's losing all of its emotional quality and it's not landing and none of it lands. So every single step they put removes that emotional intimacy. And and the intent that they had at the beginning was no longer present because what was it was buried under all of these I don't want to say half measures because they were trying their best.

So that's not the appropriate way of of saying it. But but but it kind of misfires in a sense. So I looked at I looked at that and then I basically I took my cell phone and I recorded a video of me basically pleading with them to not use this, telling them that, like, I would be more than happy to try to put it together, but pleading with them to not use it and explaining to them what they should do instead.

And and as I'm communicating to them with my with my cell phone, it kind of became a meta video to where I didn't set this thing up on a tripod. I was just hand-holding it. I'm communicating to them my heart and my desire and and why they should do it differently. But then they are seeing me in a more authentic way because I'm, I'm not trying to sit up.

I'm not trying to, to erect myself. I'm appearing to them as I am. Right. I was, I was I was who I was. Right. I wasn't trying to to to look professional. I was relaxed and confident with who I was. And therefore, I was able to speak to them as a person. Right. Because that's how I talk to them.

You know? OK. And then I sent them that that that video and I sent them that message. I was like, no, you should if you're going to use your cell phone, you should do this. Also, because this was like super early into the pandemic. So I was about to go drive over there, leave it for them.

And so they looked at that and they within 5 minutes recorded it and do one where they were sitting side by side talking into the cell phone. And instead of reading the script, they were just saying what they wanted to say. And when they did that, when they weren't trying to stand up in front of like some sort of area, they weren't trying to sit up straight.

They were just being who they were. It was it they finally nailed it. They captured that emotional authenticity that they were going for. However, they had to be vulnerable to do that. They had to trust that that that being open, being direct, being honest, kind of letting their guard down a little bit. Would be what would sell the message.

OK, and it worked. It was great. Like they were able to to get that sort of like boost of funds to get them through that really difficult time. And there's they're still going at it strong, which is awesome.

So basically with that with that story of that nonprofit, right, what we end up seeing is in a larger organization, you're basically doing that at an organizational level. We're putting barriers between that organization and the audience to the point where you've basically cut off any sort of ability to very quickly create that emotional connection between the organization and the audience.

Because the organization feels cut off. It feels cold. It feels distant. It feels like an institution rather than it feeling genuine like rather than you being able to sense that there's a heart behind it. A lot of this, too, isn't isn't just thinking what, like striving for professionalism sometimes it's also striving for what you believe is the style of the format.

Right? So if you if you go back and you watch some of my earlier YouTube videos or some of my earlier just like marketing videos in general, when I'm in front of camera, I have a completely different tone and completely different camera presence than I do right now. All right. Because I'm I'm kind of like trying to emulate what you'll see.

What you'll notice is a YouTube tone I'm just like, I don't I'm not who tried to expend that much energy when I'm doing this podcast. But like, there is you'll notice that there is a specific YouTube tone that most YouTubers have because it is it's kind of like the the old radio voice from the forties and fifties for some odd reason, everybody sounded like that.

There is a specific tone and rhythm and presentation that almost becomes like a norm. And we then try to emulate that and match that when we're on camera. And, and suddenly we're then showing that that we are performing. We're not here to connect, we're here to perform, we're not here to connect. That's basically what I mean. That's another way of like when we're striving to to look professional, when we're striving to hit that expected level of professionalism, we think, OK, it's another thing that we're putting in front of ourselves that is preventing us from from really that connection, that emotional connection with our customer.

To sum up, why is authenticity important? Authenticity is important because it allows us and striving to be authentic allows us to form a stronger emotional connection with our customer faster. But authenticity itself is kind of like realism in painting OK? Like it isn't ideal that you're striving for. It's not necessarily like a thing that you hit. So you're constantly trying to to be authentic, to to communicate authenticity.

Right. Much in the same way that a realist painter is striving to capture that sense of realism. OK. Now there's a couple of ways in which we can start to capture authentic that authentic feeling. OK. The first one is we have to remove a dissonance between our messaging and who we are as an organization. So the closer you can bring your marketing materials and your branded materials to truly communicate your essence as a company is putting you on the path towards becoming an authentic brand.

The other thing is, while we're talking about language with your copy, make your copy conversational, right? Like a human being. Speak like a human being. Use human language. Avoid as much jargon as possible when necessary. OK. I'm not saying throw out jargon completely like jargon is necessary in certain situations. All right. It's not it's not that all jargon is bad.

Jargon becomes bad when it gets in the way of just simply communicating what you actually wanted to say, and you end up making your message way too complicated. So speak like a human being. Speak like a person. Right, conversationally. The other thing is like your camera presence. If you've got people on camera for your content and if you're writing scripts in your content, like I said, like write your scripts in a conversational way and, and tailor those scripts for the individual who's reading them.

OK, so tailor them for their speech pattern. That's usually a back and forth between the copywriter and the, the person speaking and then on camera. Don't try to look so overly polished and don't try to look so buttoned up, you know, relax. And oftentimes what's really easy is to look at it. Basically, you're imagining that you're speaking to a specific individual and a specific person, that you're essentially like having a conversation with the camera, that you're not just reading a script.

OK, so there's a little bit of like, um, imaginative play that you have to inject into that where you're speaking to a specific person and that just makes everything a heck of a lot easier. Right. You'll notice if you, if you've ever gone to like if you've sat through some talks before, there's a difference when the speaker designs their talk and they're speaking it to the entire room as if they're only speaking to a single person versus a speaker who speaks to the room as they're speaking to the room and they're up there to perform.

Right. Like it. Suddenly you feel that there is a wall between you two because you realize, oh, they're not really trying to connect. They're performing and they're already starts that sort of like psychological distance there, that emotional distance Don't overshare stuff, OK? There's a reason, right? There's a reason why celebrities protect their private lives and and protect their their addresses and their home lives.

Like, there's a reason for that because people are crazy, OK? There's crazy people out there. And and so don't overshare. Don't don't like just be mindful of the protections and and be mindful of your own security and just don't overshare stuff. There's no reason to, like, take enough pictures of your house and post that over there. So that way people can figure out exactly where you live.

And people know a little too much about everything. Within your personal life where they could guess your bank questions. OK. Does that make sense? You ever watch the documentary on Netflix? Don't eff with cats. OK, these people on this documentary, we're trying to track down a serial killer and just based off of things they could see in the pictures in in like a single picture inside of a room, they were able to figure out, like the architecture.

Like like the artifacts in the room. Help them identify where they might be. They were able to track down the location of the room based off of a couple photos taken inside of that room. They could figure out what city they were in, what neighborhood they were in. And these are just like regular people trying to stop a serial killer because a person was killing cats.

OK, so just saying be careful, be mindful, be careful. There's crazy people out there. You can't trust people. You want to be trustworthy. Oh, man. But you just can't trust everybody. All right. And then the other thing, too, is like, don't overshare so much that you're like, totally frumpy because the threat is you can go outside of the bounds of your your sort of brand's realm.

Right. And so if your brand is about like, let's just say your brand is about we sell dog food, OK? It makes absolutely no sense to to share things about like at a hair salon, getting your hair done or or nails done or whatever. Right. Because your brand is about selling dog food. So if you're going to be authentic, like be authentic to the current topic of your brand, just don't go off script.

That makes sense.

Ultimately, what this is about is this is about communicating intent. And it's a lot easier for brands to be authentic when those brands actually already care about their customers, when they're already customer centric, when they already embrace values of meaningful work, transparency, openness, authenticity. When they they embrace honesty, when they're truly viewing their business as a vehicle for creating good, for helping people, for adding value, you'll find that those brands naturally trend towards being more authentic because they have nothing to hide.

They're not doing anything nefarious. And so therefore, it's easy for them. OK, um, it's so it's like, my assumption is if you're interested in authenticity already, then just don't try so hard. Basically, just, just allow your intent to, to race to kind of float to the surface pull that up more, shine your light on your intent more and on your heart more.

And don't try to be don't strive to be so buttoned up because that's going to create walls that are going to prevent your audience from having that deep emotional connection with your brand. And it's going to add more time ultimately to your sales or fundraising process. All right. Hope this was helpful. If you guys have any questions, as always, you can find me on Instagram or Twitter @storytelligent.

You can always reach me on the website at McNabbstorytelling.com, and I'll see you in the next one. Take care.