Everyone Wants Authenticity Until It Gets Messy

Every brand says they want to be authentic. Then someone accidentally posts a typo and suddenly the entire marketing department is called into an emergency meeting. Raise of hands if you’ve been there.

We live in a business world where everyone claims they want to show the human side of their company, but the moment something feels a little too, well, human, everyone gets nervous.

A sentence ends with two periods instead of one. Someone says "um" in a video. A dog wanders into the frame. The camera shakes. And…. we PANIC!!!!!!! Then delete immediately.

Meanwhile, the audience is sitting there thinking, "That was actually kind of refreshing." Somewhere along the way, businesses started confusing professionalism with perfection. The problem is that people don't actually connect with perfection. They connect with people.

Think about your favorite company you genuinely enjoy following online. Chances are, you don't love them because every piece of content is flawless. You love them because they feel real.

At KR Squared, some of the content people remember most has very little to do with marketing. It's the office dogs or Sally, our rescue horse. It's the behind-the-scenes moments that were never intended to become "content" in the first place.

Ironically, those moments often outperform the carefully crafted posts everyone spent weeks perfecting. It’s not because strategy doesn't matter; but strategy without personality is just information. You know what happens to information? It’s easy to forget.

That's especially true right now. Audiences are becoming remarkably good at spotting content that feels manufactured. They can sense when something has been polished so aggressively that every ounce of personality has been sanded away.

The funny part is that most brands aren't struggling because they lack authenticity. They're struggling because they're editing it out. 

Now, I need to be clear, this isn't an argument for being sloppy. Nobody is suggesting you throw grammar out the window, replace your marketing plan with chaos, and let the office dogs run your social media account. Although given some of the content we've seen lately, it's worth considering.

The point is that authenticity isn't the absence of professionalism. It's the absence of pretending. It's allowing people to see the humans behind the logo.

They're looking for brands that feel genuine enough to believe, and occasionally, that means😁 leaving the dog in the video.