This document discusses key aspects of building an authentic brand identity. It explores really knowing the brand's values, personality, and voice. It emphasizes the importance of storytelling, focusing on craftsmanship, sticking to roots over time, loving the work, immersing in markets, connecting with communities, and ensuring staff embrace the brand culture. Reading suggestions provide further information on authenticity, building brands, cultural changes, and modernization trends.

1. In Search of Brand Authenticity
Tim Harrap
Head of Collaboration
Lye Cross Farm

3. Who Am I Truly & Deeply?
There’s so much subtlety to the art of brand building, so many layers of
expression to understand and master. Yet perhaps the most important thing is
one that most brands fail to grasp; truly knowing and understanding who they
are – the values that underpin their behaviors, the personality that drives their
expression, and the voice that drives their communication.
David Ansett
Creator of Brands

5. “Markets are conversations”
the cluetrain manifesto
• Story telling
• Artisanal Amateurs
• Sticking to your roots
• Loving the doing
• Market immersion
• Being at one with the community
• Indoctrinating staff into the brand culture

6. (1) Story Telling
• Brands as collections of stories
• Traditional approach – brand rule book
• Idiosyncratic – Dorset Cereals in Jamaica
• Ten Stories -

7. Ten Stories
1. Founding myth
2. Family
3. Conflict struggle
4. Triumph/Tragedy
5. Creation
6. History
7. Community
8. Place
9. Consumers
10. Product Service

8. (2) Artisanal amateurs
• Amateurs – engaged personal passion
• Artisans – skilled craftspeople / small batches
• Appearances – downplaying industry
• Perceptions of sincerity
• Providing rich history-
• reflecting humanity
• & yet,
• setting standards of industry DC packs

10. (3) Sticking to your roots
• Stylistic consistency – evolving slowly
• Retaining key traditions – PDO
• New initiatives – founding spirit (IB)
• Moral Messages – Pilgrims
• Revitalisation – recommit to roots– buyouts DC
• Supportive Communication
• Focal Activities – Farmers/farming

12. (4) Loving the doing
• Production focused
• Experiencing production – LXF, grading
• Leaders involved in production
• Espouse love of craft
• Quest for excellence – DC over engineered
• Being design led – DC revamp

13. (5)a Market immersion
• Tom Peters – focus groups produce
products “of” the market – shelves full
of “me-too”
• Inspiration not necessarily from your
current customers – reinterpretations
e.g. Korea

14. (5)b Market immersion
• Employ your customers – qualitative input
• Live in the market – Arnault LVMH visit the market
• Trust your gut – Roddick “don’t work within systems”
• Employees to dabble
• Seed the fanbase
“Authenticity has always been derived from the intuition of
the artist” Beverland p139

15. (6) Being at one with the community
“Notion of putting down roots central to our identity”
Beverland p143
• Time / Place / Culture
• Nation – Scotland!
• Region – Wyke Somerset
• Industry – Heritage and Quality
• Culture – Starbucks Australia stripped of cultural heritage
• Sub-culture of consumption – Star-trek LX or LXF
“customers and consumers communicate “an idea of what your
brand signifies” McKitterick p87

17. (7) Indoctrinating staff!
• Staff selection
• Welfare > salary
• Tell their stories – Yammer
• Manage non-performance
• Staff as stewards of the brand
• Transmitting tacit knowledge to new staff
• Encourage creativity
• risk taking, free thinking, encourage curiosity

18. Democracy

20. Modernity – Post Modernity
Materialism – Post Materialism
Media - Social Media

21. “Increasing consumer power, accelerated
by the meteoric rise of social media,
threatens the foundations of branding”
Mitchell 2012

23. “…modernization is a process of human
development, in which economic
development gives rise to cultural changes
that make individual autonomy, gender
equality and democracy increasingly
likely.”Inglehart & Welzel

25. The Zero Marginal Cost Society
The internet of things, the
collaborative commons, and the
eclipse of capitalism

26. Contact points
Twitter
• tim_harrap
• BritishCheese
• LyeCrossFarm

27. Useful links
• Alvis Family, Lye Cross Farm
• Michael Beverland, University of Bath
• Truly Deeply Melbourne
• Kinship Digital Australia
• Shift Podcasts by Euan Semple & Megan Murray
• Harold Jarche Making sense of the networked era
• Only Dead Fish Neil Perkin

28. Reading
• Authenticity – Pine & Gilmour
• Building Brand Authenticity – Beverland
• The Cluetrain Manifesto – Levine et al
• Humanize – Notter & Grant
• McKitterick’s Conundrum Mitchell
• Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy
Inglehart & Welzel
• Monocle magazine and The Entrepreneurs podcasts
• Organizations Don’t Tweet People Do – Semple
• The Zero Marginal Cost Society - Rifkin

29. Thank you