In a New York Times review of the exhibit, “Chemistry, Authenticity and the Meaning of Art,” Michael Kimmelman focuses on “The Allegory”, a painting thought to be by Botticelli when it was acquired over a century ago. Critics immediately decried it as a fake, but after decades in storage the Gallery examined it again — closely — and determined it wasn’t a fake. It may not be a Botticelli, but it is an original from that timeframe.

Kimmelman then wonders how much that matters: “It’s a picture. And the picture is the same whether it is said to be old or new, genuine or fake, an original or a copy. It becomes no more or less elegant or funny looking. Its role in the evolving narratives of art history changes. Its price can go up or down. But cost is not value.” And he finds value in this particular painting, for “It’s beautiful.”

The same is true of business offerings. Whether old or new, genuine or fake, an original or a copy — or, to put it another way, whether Real-real, Real-fake, Fake-real, or even Fake-fake — some customers may find your offerings of value,  perhaps even beautiful. It may be too late to render your offerings fully Real-real, so find those customers who, when they examine your economic output — closely — find the value within.

Great question, that. In direct reference to Starbucks, Jim and I state on the second page of the book that “nothing kills authenticity like ubiquity” and go on to note, “The success of Starbucks no longer depends on its operational prowess or taste superiority; it lies solely in sustaining coffee drinkers’ perception of the Starbucks experience as authentic.”

So how did Mr. Schultz reply? “You have to have a 100% belief in your core reason for being. . . . You can’t get out of this by trying to navigate with a different road map, one that isn’t true to yourself. You have to be authentic, you have to be  true, and you have to believe in your heart that this is going to work.”

This venti, nonfat, 6-pump, extra hot Tazo Chai Tea drinker wishes him well.

In “Voyage to the Bottom of the Day Care Center“, The New York Times reviewer first of all sings the movie’s praises (as does this AuthenticityBook.com reviewer, who saw it on opening night in 3D with no kids in tow), calling it “as sweet, as touching, as humane a movie as you are likely to see this summer, and yet it is all about doodads stamped and molded out of plastic and polyester.”

Think about that for a moment: this is a fictional movie that is an animation about toys that come to life when humans aren’t looking. It is therefore all the more amazing when Scott says next: “Therein lies its genius, and its uncanny authenticity. A tale that captured the romance and pathos of the consumer economy, the sorrows and pleasures that dwell at the heart of our materialist way of life, could only be told from the standpoint of the commodities themselves, those accretions of synthetic substance and alienated labor we somehow endow with souls.” Such is the essence of rendering.

Joe Morgenstern also refers to the number one consumer sensibility over at The Wall Street Journal in his review, “An Ode to ‘Toy‘”, where he says, “It’s possible that nothing could have matched the authentic heartbreak of Buzz Lightyear’s earlier discovery that he is not a real space ranger on an alien planet but a piece of plastic powered by batteries and made in Taiwan. (If you want to know what superlative storytelling looks, sounds and feels like, there’s a scene to study.)”

Again, think about that for a moment: the authentic heartbreak of a come-to-life toy who discovers he’s not a real space ranger in an animated movie made with the height of computer technology and shown in artificial 3D.

That such scenes in such movies inspire such odes to authenticity demonstrates the power of referential authenticity — and the genius of Pixar, not only one of the best experience stagers in the world, but thanks to its RenderMan software, one of the best a rendering authenticity as well.

Consider British Petroleum — or BP p.l.c. as it is now named. Two years after it bought Amoco and renamed itself in 1998, it launched a series of advertising campaigns to the effect that its initials stood for “Beyond Petroleum.” These ads trumpeted BP’s investments in solar, wind, and hydrogen energy (and even not-so-green-but-at-least-it’s-not-oil natural gas) — all the while continuing and even bolstering its investments in oil extraction in such places as the Arctic Refuge and making  relatively minuscule investments in so-called “green energy.” The campaign was met with near-universal skepticism; a Fortune article on the $174 billion company put it, “If the world’s second-largest oil company is beyond petroleum, Fortune is beyond words.”

By late 2005, however, one commentator could remark, “reality seems to be closing in on perception.” Among other successes, BP lowered emissions of greenhouse gases, launched the BP Alternative Energy unit, and saw its Solar unit take 10 percent of the global market and turn a profit for the first time. The company encountered a series of calamities, however. In 2004, an accident at a Texas oil refinery killed two workers — and six months later an explosion killed fifteen at the same refinery. In early 2006, a pipeline in Alaska spilled over 200,000 gallons of oil, while in August the company had to shut down its Prudhoe Bay facilities after discovering extensive corrosion in its pipeline system. Also that year the U.S. Labor Department fined BP $2.4 million for “unsafe operations” at an Ohio refinery; the Justice Department, meanwhile, alleged that traders for the company illegally manipulated the propane market, and then a billion-dollar platform in the Gulf of Mexico didn’t hold up during Hurricane Dennis. Once again environmentalists, among many others, questioned the company’s  motives. Business columnist Joe Nocera put it point-blank: “It’ll be a long time before anyone believes anything BP has to say about its environmental sensitivity.” Remember how easy being perceived as phony is when you advertise what you are not.

Where does the blame lie? Is BP’s strategic intention of going “beyond petroleum,” put in place by former chairman Lord John Browne, outside the limits of its execution zone? Is its body of values — or perhaps even its essence of enterprise — at odds with that intention? Or is it simply execution? Craig Smith of the London Business School answers that one: “What we are  seeing is not a failure of strategy but of execution.” The company itself concurs, making “Executing more effectively” one of four key steps it outlines in its 2006 Annual Report. Even if you affix a future firmly within the limits of what is possible-and we think BP has not yet made its case; it should have waited to proclaim itself Beyond Petroleum until it could at least see that point in its strategic horizon on — you still must execute, and execute well. 

Comment #1: Now everyone knows BP is not beyond petroleum.
Comment #2: It’s problem still lies in execution.

Our waiter was in fact a chef, who asked us what we liked to eat, and then proceeded to craft and cook a wonderful Scandinavian meal just for us. He even worked around my confessed lack of appreciation for fish, no small thing in a part of the world surrounded by ocean.

Now I learn that Noma is no longer #3 — it is #1, as ranked by Restaurant magazine. In a interview in The Wall Street Journal, “A New King of the Food World,” owner/chef René Redzepi talks of how his fellow Danish chefs laughed at his desire to create haute cuisine that was not French but solely and wholly Scandinavian, some of them even suggesting he call it “The Stinky Whale”.

But Redzepi persisted in being true to his locale, and by appealing to authenticity became the best in the world at his profession.

Except there is no period at the end of that line, just a semi-colon; Polonius goes on to say in that sentence: “And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” All together we find here the two key standards of authenticity Jim and I talk about in Chapter 6: (1) Being true to self, and (2) Being what you say you are to others.

Now being an advertising guy, Garfield mostly, and rightly, castigates KFC for the second, representational aspect of authenticity — advertising things it is not as it tries to come off as healthy eatin’. But toward the end he gets to the point of his opening quote, asking of the Fake-fake KFC:

“Why does KFC feel the need to be perceived as something more wholesome and beneficial than it actually is? Look, these people sell crunchy, juicy, yummy fried chicken. It tastes good. Yeah, it’s greasy. Yeah, it’s basically a salt lick with bones. Yeah, it’s not something you should probably be indulging in too often (and by ‘too often’ I mean, ‘more than once per presidential administration.’) But, for goodness sake, there’s  nothing to be ashamed of. It’s comfort food, not snake venom. Or heroin. Or deep-fried Donner Party.

“Me, if I were forging brand strategy, I’d defiantly promote my dietary incorrectness. I’d flip the bird at the food police and wave my greasy napkin as a battle flag. Sure beats lying — not only on moral grounds, but on the basis of pure common sense.”

Sometimes, rendering authenticity is just a matter of pure common sense. It’s a wonder more companies do not figure that out.

P.S. Thanks to Experience Evangelist Jeff Kallay for pointing this article out to us.

In “A Bet on Last Century’s Styles To Open This Century’s Wallets,” the journalist cites Jantzen, Eddie Bauer, Lands’ End, L.L. Bean, General Mills, and Pepsi-Cola, among others. The tenor of the piece attributes this desire for nostalgia to the economic times; Eddie Bauer CEO Neil Fiske gets it right when he says “There’s something major going on right now in the American consumer market and mind-set which is leading people to embrace heritage brands. People want to believe in things that are American and want to be part of things that have longevity.”

But what is going on is much more than a faddish response to a temporary situation. Lands’ End CEO Nick Coe makes exactly that point, and concludes, “Buying habits have pretty seriously changed from the crazy consumption of the previous decade. It’s not necessarily about cheap - it’s about real value.”

It’s about authenticity.

As I’ve mentioned before — see Coca-Cola Classic, RIP — New Coke is an offering that failed entirely because it was perceived as inauthentic by the very people who Coca-Cola wanted to buy it. New Coke was Pepsi clothed in Coke red (as it was designed to be!), and old Coke buyers weren’t buying it, in either sense of the world.

It wasn’t true to self, and twenty-five years isn’t too long a time to learn that lesson.

Daniel Howard, marketing professor at Southern Methodist University, says it is brilliant marketing, while noting the irony: “They’re celebrating the Earth and nature by producing goods that require the use of natural resources to make.”

Meanwhile, over at The New York Times, in “At 40, Earth Day Is Now Big Business“, the national coordinator of the first Earth Day, Denis Hayes, is less impressed with the irony and more concerned about the tragedy, saying “This ridiculous perverted marketing has cheapened the concept of what is really green.”

Such is the case when the Authenticity Paradox rears its head. It is all fake, but consumers perceive it as real, so marketers will use it to render authenticity.

I highly recommend getting and reading A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change and the Fate of the Irish Pub by Bill Barich.  I just finished this delightful book while vacationing in the U.K. this month.  It’s full of passages wrestling with issues of authenticity, as Barich details his travels — and travails — in search of an authentic Irish pub in Ireland.  An excerpt of chapter 4 from the book is available here, courtesy of The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/books/chapters/chapter-pint.html?em=&pagewanted=all.