I am fascinated, and a little baffled, by false authenticity.

The very contradiction in terms should inherently invalidate it as a strategy, but we see it everywhere and the trend is not going away anytime soon.

At it’s core, false authenticity in marketing means paying someone to pretend to love your product or service.

As I see it, there are two distinct flavors of false authenticity, which for simplicity’s sake we’ll call “lo-fi” and “hi-fi” false authenticity.

lo-fi false authenticity

The technical name for this kind of false authenticity is “user generated content” or UGC.

This is when a company pays a person (generally someone without a large existing audience base) to create content as if it were a spontaneous review or genuine reaction.

This is pretty popular with companies because it’s cheaper than sponsoring someone with an audience and it usually blends in fairly well with the actual authentic content on social media.

hi-fi false authenticity

This is the strangest form of false authenticity to me because it’s so obvious.

This is when a company creates highly produced marketing content which pretends that it is a popular form of content which would otherwise be fairly low in production quality.

For example, large tech companies using their huge budgets to fake a hipster podcast or the spontaneous man-on-the-street style interviews which are popular on TikTok.

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But no matter which flavor you choose, the use of the false authenticity charade is always primarily concerned with capturing value rather than providing it.

If you really want your business to come across as authentic, it seems much easier to find a way to speak directly to your audience than to concoct an elaborate game of make-believe.