Fakeness vs. Authenticity

The business world is pretty two-faced about most things. For example, one side of the face is saying “We truly value transparency and authenticity — the newest BS buzzword that most executives couldn’t recognize with a flashlight mining helmet on. The other side is racing to embrace AI automation to replace all human connection from its brands with highly more efficient and speedy “agentic AI.”  They even brag about it. — I should remind you that the A in AI stands for….artificial.

And another word for artificial is…fake. Not genuine. Not real. In other words, pretty much the opposite of authenticity. Ironic, no?

And here are some good recent examples of fake stuff I’ve seen that’s been marketed to me

— “Scott, we’d like to publish your next book and we GUARANTEE NY Times Best-Seller status via our process of buying thousands of advance copies (using your budget), paying people to positively review the book on Amazon and other places and just blasting it everywhere via social media.” — Yikes, there is so much wrong with this, I really don’t know where to begin. The main thing wrong with it is that you aren’t really a NY bestselling author — you have gamed the system to create the appearance of that. I’d rather have real readers and really reach people with my books.

“Scott, we just love the work you did with Kings & Kingdoms (one of our past clients) and we have a few clients just like them we’d like to send over to you.” —Turns out they actually have a “system” to bother everyone I know and have ever met on LinkedIn and email with a sleazy sales pitch (probably written by an AI). But it gets better — they used AI to “scrape” my website and pull my past client names into the email to “personalize” the marketing experience for me. LOL — that’s NOT how you do it.

Oh and the best part — I’ve received the EXACT same wording on probably 10-15 direct messages or emails per day so somebody out there got their greedy little hands on some handy AI software, bought themselves a list with my email on it—and just went to town.  More like all of these bottom feeders are using the SAME AI tools to create their emails and since they don’t care about quality, they just blast out anything in the vague hope that 1 or 2 out of thousands might make a sale. Pathetic—and the OPPOSITE of actual marketing.

So…what SHOULD they be doing?

Start with EMPATHY – what are my business problems, what do I need, where can they add value to me?  Good relationships, real ones begin with EMPATHY.

Build a story where I get what I want/need and get to be the HERO (spoiler — I’m already the hero of my story and my brain will filter away anything perceived to be irrelevant to that journey.). (Yours does that too btw.)

Amplify this messaging using NON-INVASIVE means including social posts with some value, PR where they can demonstrate some trust and thought leadership or show me a case study where they solved a similar problem to mine.

This method of marketing is harder, takes longer and you MUST be committed to creating long-term relationships over short term sales. But when you build your brand like this, you get the good stuff – trust, commitment and yes, even brand loyalty. This is the way.

My way of doing things is real, it’s truly authentic and leads with empathy in a world of the same old crap in your inbox and companies NOT really caring about that fact. Our marketing can be better. Before everything becomes fake.