Brand Authenticity: What Every Business Needs to Know
As AI-generated content flooded feeds through 2023 and 2024, audiences got better at spotting polish and rewarding brands willing to look unfinished.
Brand authenticity became a harder thing to fake right around the time it became easier than ever to produce polished content at scale. That’s not a coincidence. As generative AI tools made slick copy, images and video cheap to produce throughout 2023 and into 2024, audiences got measurably more skeptical of content that felt too smooth, and more responsive to anything that looked like it came from an actual person rather than a content pipeline.
Why this became a live issue for businesses
The app BeReal, which asked users to post one unedited photo a day at a random prompted time, became a genuine cultural moment in 2022 and 2023 specifically because it pushed against the curated, filtered aesthetic that had defined social media for a decade. Its popularity faded as a standalone app, but the instinct behind it didn’t: raw, lower-production content kept outperforming polished ads in engagement across platforms, and brands that noticed adjusted accordingly. Around the same time, a wave of businesses started putting founders and employees directly in front of the camera instead of running everything through an agency-produced brand voice, betting that a recognizable person builds more trust than a logo.
The decision framework
Before treating authenticity as a content strategy, a business needs an honest answer to three questions.
Do you have a real story to tell? Authenticity isn’t a tone you can apply to any message, it’s a description of whether the message is true. A business with a genuine, specific reason for existing, an actual founder story, real production process or honest point of view, has something to work with. A business trying to manufacture a story it doesn’t have will produce something that reads as authenticity-flavored marketing, which audiences are now unusually good at detecting.
Are you willing to show something imperfect? The brands getting real traction with this approach are the ones publishing behind-the-scenes footage, unscripted employee commentary or founder videos that aren’t fully rehearsed. If every piece of content still has to go through the same approval process built for a polished ad campaign, it will keep looking like one, no matter how casual the intent.
Can you back claims with something concrete? This matters especially for values-driven claims. A business that says it cares about something, sustainability, craftsmanship, community, needs to be able to point to a specific, checkable practice behind that claim. Vague sentiment without substance is exactly the kind of messaging audiences have grown fatigued by.
What this doesn’t mean
Authenticity isn’t an excuse for sloppy execution or inconsistent branding. It also isn’t about abandoning strategy in favor of “just being real,” since plenty of the most effective founder-led and employee-led content in 2024 was deliberately planned, just planned around honesty and specificity rather than polish. The goal is truthful, not careless.
Who should invest here first
This matters most for businesses selling anything where trust in the people behind it drives the purchase decision: professional services, food and hospitality, anything positioned around craft or values and any founder-led business where the person behind the company is a genuine asset. It matters less for categories where the purchase decision is driven almost entirely by price or spec comparison, where authenticity is a nice addition but rarely the deciding factor.
Related coverage: Marketing Strategy guides or everything published in 2024.
