There are six briefs on my dining table right now, from four different categories, and I ran the same search on every one of them. Authentic appears in all six. Twice in two of them. One brief uses it in the positioning statement and then again, thirty pages later, in the tone of voice guidance, as though the second mention were contributing something the first had not.
A dish soap. A regional credit union. A mattress company. A hard seltzer.
All authentic. None of them authentic in the same way, and not one of the briefs says which way it means.
A word that describes every brand in a category describes no brand in that category. This is not a style complaint. It is arithmetic. A claim only separates you if some reasonable competitor could look at it and decline to make it, and no competitor on earth is going to stand up in a boardroom and argue for being fake.
Authentic is not a brand attribute. It is the placeholder where the actual attribute was supposed to go, and it survives every round of review because nobody can argue against it.
When a brief reaches me with that word in it, I ask three questions before anything else.
One. What is the opposite? If the opposite is absurd, you have written nothing. Warm has cold. Precise has loose. Irreverent has reverent, and plenty of good brands pick reverent on purpose. Authentic has inauthentic, which no client will ever choose, which means the word is doing zero work in the sentence.
Two. Who is allowed to say it? Oatly, which filed to go public last month, prints copy on its own cartons mocking its own marketing department. That is not authenticity, that is a specific and slightly hostile sense of humor a credit union could not borrow without sounding unwell. Liquid Death sells water in a beer can and calls it murdering your thirst. Salt & Straw puts strange local produce in ice cream and names the farm it came from. Each of those is a narrow, arguable, refusable choice.
Three. What does it cost you? Patagonia's version of the word costs real revenue every time the company tells you to repair the jacket instead of replacing it. If your authenticity costs you nothing, it is decoration.
If your authenticity costs you nothing, it is decoration.
I have not stood in front of the karaoke screen in Southeast Portland in over a year now, and I miss it more than I expected to. The host called everybody baby. I sang Landslide, always, and I sang it badly, and I meant every syllable. Nothing about that performance was good. All of it was authentic. Notice that being authentic did not once make it good.