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2 February, 2016
Authenticity
For an organisation, authenticity should be a constant variable. There was a Facebook conversation involving the Dutch airline KLM that appeared in the news, for which KLM was lauded for its authentic reaction. ‘KLM my man, I need you bro!’ That is a rough equivalent of how Willem Nout started his message on the Facebook page of KLM, writing in Dutch street slang. He wanted to fly to San Francisco, making a stop in New York to go ‘chill’ there. Willem wanted to know how to get there as thriftily as possible. The airline replied with style. ‘What up, Willem! The Big Apple is mad awesome for sure.’ KLM recommended booking an extra flight within the country. That is nicely done, of course. But in order to call it authenticity, you should also be able to make a post in the Frisian dialect and get a reply in Frisian back. Or in The Hague’s regional slang, et cetera. Only when this is done by default can you call it authenticity. In order to implement that properly, messages in slang or dialect should actually be sent to a department where there are employees who speak that language. Incidentally, when I sent them a message in street slang a week later, I received not only almost a hundred likes from people who saw it — but also a reply from KLM written in standard Dutch.
It is interesting to see how various terms like trust, transparency and authenticity used to be mainly used for people, but now we judge companies in the same ways. At the moment, companies primarily see this as a commercial opportunity. However, the consumer discovers more and more often that it is just a trick, which makes them consider those companies unauthentic. That is detrimental to trust.
In order to be authentic, you need to be autonomous. Being autonomous means being free in your actions. It means not being restricted by a strict system. So it starts with the freedom of the employees that make up the company. But the company should guide it. If an employee working at a funeral insurance company would reply with ‘what up, Willem’, it wouldn’t have the same effect.
Meaning
Meaning is an immediate answer to the question ‘why’. Why should people become customers of our organisation? Many organisations still think customers like being customers. Think of the financial sector for example. We do not like being customers of a bank at all. We have to be customers of a bank. If you really want to be meaningful as an organisation, then you need to contribute to someone’s life in a positive way. People need to feel that they want to be your customers.
But there is more and more competition. Think of airports for example. Twenty years ago, there were three major companies renting cars. Nowadays, there are twenty of them in a row. They all offer the same type of car for roughly the same price. The only difference is that one might be just one euro cheaper than another or use pushier marketing tactics to compel their customers just that little bit more. These companies have become interchangeable. They have lost their meaning. On top of that, feeling the pressure of the 24 hour economy, the average time a consumer is willing to spend thinking about a decision has dropped drastically.
That is why it is important for an organisation to be emotionally meaningful to its consumers. Functional meaning is not that important to us any more. Anyone can provide that. We just do not have time to think about that any more. That is why these days people feel more personally connected with a company like Apple than a chip manufacturer like Intel.
