Millennial American fashion designer Zach Posen, who among other accomplishments led the 2018 redesign of the uniforms for all 60,000 Delta Air Lines, was recently asked what is cool right now. His answer?
“Don’t worry about what’s cool or not cool. Authenticity is what’s cool.” Millennials and Generation Z Americans, essentially people born since 1980, have grown up in a world of fake. From fake friends on Facebook to social influencers posing glamorous on Instagram to the 15-second snippets of micro-entertainment distraction on TikTok, very little of what they see online or through social media is as it really is. Moreover, in an ever-increasing desire to stand out, to keep your eyeballs moving down a web page, and to achieve “click-throughs” and “impressions,” advertisers have amped up their messages to a point where the consumer has become numb. Today anyone can publish content, so traditional news sources fade into the noise. People no longer take things at face value.”
What this has bred is a desire for authenticity and reality. Increasingly, people no longer want to go the Paris hotel in Las Vegas, but instead want to go to Paris, the actual city. They don’t want to go to the Japan pavilion at Disney World, but instead want to actually go to Japan. We want things that we see as
John McDonald will lead the next Chamber member webinar, Innovate or Risk Being Left Behind: Pandemic Lessons and Trends, on April 12.
genuine, simple, natural and real.
A great example of this is the explosion in the use of video conferencing services such as Zoom. Most of us knew about these tools before the pandemic, but rarely used them – until we had to. What we quickly discovered was how more efficient we could be with our time. Instead of having to get in the car or an airplane to have a face-to-face conversation with someone far away, we only needed to click a button.
So why didn’t we adopt this before we had to? It is not new technology, but instead it was a rapid and widespread dropping of the social stigma around virtual meetings.
Before if you had told your boss or a customer you wanted to convert a meeting from face-to-face to a video conference, they would immediately think that they were not important enough for you to make the effort. Now it’s a way of life, and not only are we more efficient, but we’ve gained great flexibility and range in where and when we work, and also who we are working with. It’s also greatly reduced expenses for office space and support, fuel and parking, business attire, dry cleaning, lunchtime meals and travel, so it’s extremely unlikely that the old way of working will fully come back.
We discovered some downsides, too, like “Zoom Fatigue” – that feeling of being worn down after a long day videoconferencing. The human brain is wired to take in about 55% of information from body language, according to UCLA Professor Dr. Albert Mehrabian, with 38% coming from tone of voice and only 7% from the actual spoken words. Stanford researchers discovered that when you have a screen full of faces all moving and communicating without speaking, our brains become overwhelmed with information, leading to fatigue.
But truly the biggest impact of video conferencing has been the obliteration of the already fake lines between what is work, what is home, and what is school. In the past we took great care to segment these universes – to pretend that we could separate life from our job, or that school only happens in a certain building. Now we welcome into our homes all kinds of people all day long through the camera lens. They can see our dog walk up for some attention, or our children playing or yelling in the background, or the messy piles of papers around us, all of which would have been unthinkable before the pandemic. Now we all see real life as it is – a messy conglomeration of work, school and home. It is a fantastic expression of authenticity and reality.
From farmer’s markets to combination live-work apartments to our desire to see the body camera footage for ourselves as citizen auditors of our public servants, there are examples of the desire for authenticity all around us. So, how can you leverage this for your organization? Here are a few ideas:
- Know that authenticity starts with leadership. Your employees and co-workers are attracted to leaders who are honest and authentic, and to companies that have a culture that recognizes and supports being real. Does your organization celebrate the uniqueness of everyone and what they have to offer? Do you have fossilized policies in your employee handbook that reinforce the old, fake walls between work and life and school? Do you ask people to stay within their chain of command, or do you support them in finding mentors from all over and outside of your organization? Do you have a “company charity,” or do you enable people to give of their time, talents and treasure in ways they can see the impact directly? How flexible are you with the realities of being a parent, a student and a worker at the same time?
- Your brand conveys what you stand for to the world. What does it say about your authenticity? A great example of this is the “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty,” launched by Unilever in 2004 and still going strong, which seeks to replace Photoshopped supermodels with real people with real bodies using Dove products. Are you attempting to sell your product or service through glamour or fame or fortune, which are increasingly seen by consumers as fake and deceptive, or are you about truth and clarity and reality? What does your organization’s mission statement, logo tag line or last news release headline say about your celebration of being authentic? Do you post blog articles by actual employees? This can be a great way to help your stakeholders get to know the real people working in your organization.
- Increasingly customers are looking for what’s called “symmetry of information.” This is simply the idea that your customers know as much about you as you know about them. It’s more than just allowing customers to opt-out of your newsletter or to compel you to delete their records if they ask, and more about exposing what’s going on inside your organization to the outside world through social media. If your stakeholders can see and audit who you are, they are much more likely to share their information with you. This can also greatly amplify the success of a simultaneous shift in policies and brand messages toward the authentic.
Authenticity is something your stakeholders are seeking now. While it was already happening prior to the pandemic, like so many things, it was greatly accelerated by it. The only question for you is if you will be the victim or the victor of this megatrend that is shaping our world.
John McDonald is the managing entrepreneur at NEXT Studios, the venture studio by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs, with entrepreneurs. He is also the chairman of the Chamber’s Technology and Innovation Policy Committee. McDonald has over 20 years of experience as a technology entrepreneur, public speaker and published author.
