Authenticity: SXSW and How I Learned to Stop Speaking Bull
How often do we mask our messages with office-speak?
When we speak in business speak; when we use industry jargon; we mask what we’re honestly meaning to say and we’re not being authentic. When we’re not authentic, we don’t inspire trust. And nobody has time for a brand they don’t trust.
Authenticity was a running theme through most of the workshops I attended at SXSW. And the “Stop Speaking Bull***” session was the peak. As a marketer, I was inspired … but also as a leader and manager. (In addition to authenticity, I came back from Austin with lessons on vulnerability and resilience. Keep an eye out for my upcoming pieces that tie the three together.)
BUT IT'S SO EASY...
It’s so easy to fall into the internal office-speak trap. It’s easier to refer to that conference with its three-letter acronym; it’s faster to start calling that product by its four initials that so nicely combine into one nonsense word that we now all understand. It all feels perfectly natural until we hire someone new and see the look on her face in her first meeting when she finds herself awash in acronyms and seemingly nonsense words that feel very meaningful to us indeed.
As marketers, we can’t engage in the jargon in-house and still expect our message to come across authentically to those outside of our tight little nest of people who think about these things day in and day out. You know, the actual audiences we're trying to engage? But as leaders, too, we can’t do this amongst ourselves or our teams and expect our intra- or cross-team cultures to be authentic.
PEOPLE TRUST PEOPLE-POWERED BRANDS
People trust brands that come across as being powered by real people – realpeople they like. Marketing that feels like it’s coming from people who understand us, people who might even be us, will win every time.
The Nike example our workshop leaders shared illustrates this perfectly. Nike’s “Risk Everything” campaign played great with men. It reaped massive rewards to grow the business and served as a shining example that marketers could learn from. And it was completely off-putting to women. As our experts told the story, when Nike found that women wanted a sense of improvement, not pressure, when exercising, they brought us the “Better for It” campaign. I have to say, as a woman (even one who’s fallen off the workout wagon), this campaign speaks to me. Even though it’s from the same brand that brought us #riskeverything, this one still feels authentic to me. I’m ok with a multifaceted brand, as long as I can find something real in there somewhere.
SO WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?
As a b2b marketer, I think it can be extra tricky to ensure my work has authenticity; that it’s people speaking to people and not companies to companies. So, I will:
Aim to produce a blog that feels like humans speaking to humans. (Check it out and let me know how I'm doing on this.)
Find the humanity in everything from client testimonial videos to sell sheets.
Create content that serves a purpose, solves a problem, or otherwise has real value to the intended audience.
Use the bar test as often as possible – is this how I would explain this to my friend at a bar? If not, change it. If yes, go with it.
Talk and think about authenticity so much that it becomes a jargony buzzword that I have to stop using in order to sound like a real person.
By the way, I’m not going to create content to fill a hole – like, it’s Tuesday and we’re supposed to have a blog on Tuesday so somebody just please write something and put it out there because we can’t have one day without saying something even if it’s useless and a year from now we look back at it and are sure we wouldn’t publish it again. Yeah, I’m not going to do that.
The thing is, being authentic is hard. It feels like a risk. Whether you’re deciding to value human-centric language over SEO data, or being more real with your teams than perhaps you were raised to do, it feels like a risk. And a risk means potential for failure. And failure is scary, right? Or maybe not…. Hope you’ll read my blogs about vulnerability and resilience. It's all tied together!