Finding Authenticity: The Challenges Brands Face in Finding Their Authentic Voice

Brands face a great deal of difficulty in finding their authenticity, especially in the last several years. Companies like Pepsi or Apple have spent millions of dollars on ads, and those companies have spent untold millions on hiring big-money marketers and advertising firms to create an authentic voice and brand for them to become recognizable.


The thought of the money alone might mean the main struggle of a brand in finding an authentic voice is needing the money to make one. This is not the case. If it were the case, then money would be needed to make a brand authentic, but how would the brand be able to spend the money on marketing to become authentic? It is more complicated than throwing money, but it is less complicated than needing to make a ton of money to throw at it.

Build Your Brand's Voice

Finding a voice or defining the brand starts with clearing up the misconceptions about what a brand is and is not. A company can craft itself many brands or own many, so the brand is not the company. A brand is the is the summary of ideas into one simple thought, which people have formed about product being sold or service performed. A company should associate itself with the positive ideas the public and customers have developed about it. The voice for the brand is the tool of the company for expressing what the customer has developed, and the voice of the brand encourages this. It's bigger than a piece of fruit as a logo or a polar bear drinking soda. Those examples are only part of what the brand is.

The voice of the brand is hard to develop because it is more based off of emotion. It is more than something physical or something a focus group can quickly determine to be the simple psychology of the customer or potential customer. The voice is how the brand develops a way for a very real and solid emotional connection to be formed between the product or service being offered and the customers and audience.

Good Brands Utilize Pathos

Unless a very basic need is being met, then people buy with their hearts, and people will somehow justify the emotional decision later on. This is basic advertising. A good voice for a brand will drum up business by appealing primarily to emotion, and logic is a distant second, so the main challenge is developing an emotional voice, which surrounded by sincerity in a world of advertising.

David Firester is founder of TRAC Intelligence, a intelligence analysis firm.