Nobody would dispute the importance of authenticity to brands. It’s the foundation of everything they do – and sooner or later, their success diminishes without it. But despite being a marketing buzzword in recent years, authenticity is no longer enough; it’s not enough to persuade people to care about whatever it is you are being authentic about.
Authenticity means being true to an ideal concept of yourself – a ‘big idea’ in brand-speak – but it’s irrelevant unless you can demonstrate what that concept means in the real world.
This is why brands need to link their authenticity to a sense of brand purpose. It’s this that connects brands to people’s actual experiences, memories and motivations – their concept of what matters. In today’s media landscape that’s essential for capturing attention and earning engagement.
The World is my Oyster was one of BBC StoryWorks’ most successful native executions in 2015. What made this series that we created for HSBC Expat so successful? It was content that engaged and it gave the BBC audience something that we knew they wanted – great insights into what working and living abroad was like. It also exuded a sense of brand purpose. It showed what HSBC was motivated by: the experiences and the needs of those living global working lives. It provided valuable evidence of what the brand means in the context of our audience’s day-to-day experiences.
From captive audience to seeking out the story
This matters because people no longer interact with brand stories in the style of a captive audience, believing everything put in front of them. They engage in the style of a journalist or editor searching out the full story. They want to be able to interrogate the brand from all angles and see that it adds up. Engaging with a particular brand is increasingly a public statement on social media. This means that you need to know whether that brand will enhance your personal credibility or undermine it.
This is why transparency is now so important to brand content. We see this in the facial recognition research that we do to gauge audiences’ emotional reactions. In a recent study, the BBC tested transparent and non-transparent approaches to see how consumers valued the content, and how they would accept the presence of a brand. We found that levels of rejection shot up when brands weren’t honest about their involvement. Belief is impossible without transparency.
Testing and trusting brand purpose
Brands must enable audiences to test and trust their brand purpose – so they can demonstrate how it aligns with their own priorities and beliefs. This requires a different type of brand storytelling: not one, self-contained brand story but content that keeps demonstrating why the brand matters – in different contexts and different ways.
You cannot build a lasting relationship without trust, and trust is earned through demonstrating brand purpose over time. Consumers need to know what makes you tick before they can trust you, and they need to trust you before a lasting relationship can be built. Applying your brand purpose to the issues that your audience cares about and doing so consistently is the heart of purposeful marketing.
Richard Pattinson heads up BBC StoryWorks as senior vice president of content within BBC Worldwide Advertising