Joseph Pine & James Gilmore’s latest book on consumer experience and collaborative design, “What Consumers Really Want: Authenticity“, begins with an auspicious enough quote:

“To those who seek the real- and find the truth.”

The book rarely looses this important, all-be philosophical, theme.

Click here for the publication of this book review (p. 27)

Authenticity contests that consumers make purchase decisions not just on availability, price and service, but increasingly on “authenticity of experience“. Pine & Gilmore define authenticity as customer experiences based on the aligned values of vendors and consumers, and on the collaborative design on those same stakeholders. In their words:

“In a world increasingly filled with deliberately and sensationally staged experiences… consumers choose to buy or not buy based on how real they perceive an offering to be.”

Pine & Gilmore trace the development of Authenticity from: (i) an increasing demand for authenticity, in rebellion to artificial events, (ii) greater demand for self- actualisation and commitment to values and, (iii) a distrust of authority (social, business or governmental), demonstrated by open and collaborative challenge of the “status-quo”, in a pursuit to remain true to one’s self. Via this process, they identify five types of authenticity: (i) natural, (ii) original/ innovative, (iii) unique, (iv) influential, or spiritual authority and, (v) contextual, or the knowledge of authentic people, places and events.

A foundation for Pine & Gilmore’s arguments is their summary of the evolution of business from (i) goods based- consumer decisions founded on availability to, (ii) commodities based consumer decisions founded on price, to (iii) performance based consumer decisions founded on service. It is from here, Authenticity introduces an ‘authentic experience‘ based consumer decision, founded on the experience of the consumer, as it relates to their values. Pine & Gilmore introduce their “Real- Fake” (2×2) matrix, consisting of quadrants of authenticity segmented by answers to two questions: is an organisation, or person, (i) true to its self and (ii) is what it says it is? Three points then form the message of Authenticity: (i) if you are authentic, you do not have to say you’re authentic, (ii) If you say you’re authentic, then you’d better be authentic and, (iii) it’s easier to be authentic, if you don’t say you’re authentic.

Authenticity is an innovative, provocative and stimulating read with a good cross-index of case studies and graphics. It would be a mistake to not incorporate the concepts into any cultural design, customer management or operational alignment agenda. Pine & Gilmore do fail to provide a set of tangible tools and templates to foster authenticity, thus making implementation allusive, and their assertion that “despite claims of ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ in product packaging, nothing from businesses is really authentic”, suggest authentic experiences are impossible to foster, further alienating the reader from an implementation framework. Additionally, the volume of information and theoretical nature of the content may, at times, overwhelm the reader, but is still well worth the time needed to digest it.

Pine & Gilmore make a strong case that organisations find their own (unique) identity to offer consumers, that falls within its [the organisations] agreed place on the real- fake matrix. Anything less is simply inauthentic. And that’s not what consumers want.