When still a marcom tadpole, I encountered the world of an amusing, instructive, “successful”, flashy, Mississippi pea farmer who had forsaken agrarian life for the allure of corporate sales. He was unlike anything that I’d encountered before and made important and lasting impressions.
Lanky, with bony features, Joe had capped teeth before they were common (or even acceptable) and gave you a glimpse of what Elvis would have looked like if he was 4 inches taller and had spent six months on the Atkins Diet later in life. He carried himself as part preacher, part salesman and (in his world at least), all earnestness (I think). One day, while privately instructing me on a finer point of the white-collar world he said, “You know John, 90 percent of all success in business is sincerity — and once you can fake that, you have it made.”
Years later, Joe’s advice remains a fitting example of the burgeoning need for more authentic business communication and marcom styles. (It may also loom as a cautionary tale about why Joe’s original industry of media consulting has been eviscerated and is now stumbling close to the business graveyard). By the traditions of Joe’s profession, his philosophy was not whimsy, it was brilliant salesmanship — an insight that over the years he successfully used to gobble market share and gain wealth.
But Joe’s deployment of that philosophical insight had a great cost. In embracing sincerity as surreptitious insincerity, Joe reproduced Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on a daily basis. He was “inauthentically authentic” and communicated in a way that was great for his sales quota but terrible for creating communicative understanding and long-lasting relationships and value (see my comment about the media consulting business, above).
Many followed Joe’s pattern of would-be success (and many still do). But in the 21st century, refocused business mores, combined with more skeptical audiences, means this approach has crossed the point of diminishing returns. But its damage to the rhythms of effective business communications is lasting. 
Deciphering “up” from “down” and “left” from “right” and establishing any sort of business communicative trust has never been more difficult because of all the lies and deceit inherent in all those decades of inauthentic authenticity.
Change is necessary. Businesses need to broadly embrace authenticity and communication approaches that clarify, not confuse. What we say on a client’s behalf should always be built around solving a problem that is judged valuable. But above all else, it requires sending Joe (and those like him) back to the farm.
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John Durante is senior marketing associate for WordWrite Communications.
