Authenticity is Hard to Come By
but we like it when we see it
Posted Feb 25, 07:36 am in branding, business, human nature, marketing
A song like the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” would never come out today. Well, at least not in the way we know it. It’s not the charming, perhaps quaintly theme of high schoolish-infatuation that makes it unusual so much as the production. Recorded for the Beach Boys’ Party! album, it features a lot of off-key singing, missed cues, laughter, and an all-round lazy production. Ordinarily, this would be considered a disastrous performance and the master tape for this recording would be locked away in some vault so no one could ever hear it. But instead, it reached #13 on the Billboard charts in 1965 and remains one of the Beach Boys’ most iconic and loved songs.
These days, it’s not uncommon to hear about artists and producers recording and re-recording hundreds upon hundreds of takes to get everything just perfect. But in my opinion, there’s something missing from recordings that are too clean and polished. They might be technically flawless, but they tend to miss something— the human element.
Some of the best drummers in the world don’t keep a perfectly steady beat. A perfectly steady beat can be made by a machine, and you can tell immediately when a machine is doing it— not necessarily by the sounds themselves, but by the mechanical playing style. The human mind can recognize that sort of level of sterility, and we intuitively understand that good drummers swing.
In art as well as business, I believe that people do not, as a whole, respond with giddy approval to perfection that doesn’t seem honest (that is, refined to hide flaws that should be there). And by that, I don’t mean that people want service providers to screw up, or they want their products to be defective. What I mean is that people don’t want things to pretend like they are something that they’re not. While the providers of these products and services often want perfection, and spend a lot of time and money on getting it, ultimately this process is useless if no one can relate to the finished product. Something gets lost in that process of refinement— uniqueness and authenticity.
Maybe people won’t hate you for your sterile product, service, or corporate image. But I think they’d love you more for your quirks. And I’m not talking about fake quirks designed to engender exclamations of how endearingly quirky you are (see: Juno, a movie littered with some of the most forced efforts in quirkiness I have ever seen).
It’s a question of authenticity. Can we believe you are who you are claiming to be? And moreover, is this image that you are projecting something that we actually want to see?
Further reading: All Marketers are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World, by Seth Godin