How Authenticity Became Meaningless

The word “authenticity” now appears in so much brand communication that it has begun to function as its own kind of inauthenticity. The same is true of “community,” “craft,” “care,” “real,” and “human.” These are the shared symbols that brands have reached for to build trust, and they’ve been circulated so aggressively that they’ve lost most of their weight.

This is symbolic commodification: the process by which meaningful cultural signals get extracted from their original context, reproduced at scale, and gradually emptied of the meaning that made them worth borrowing in the first place.

How it happens

The mechanism is straightforward. A symbol gains cultural power because it’s associated with something real: a genuine community, a craft process that takes time, a form of care that costs something to give. Brands recognise the power and adopt the symbol. Competitors follow. Optimisation tools make adoption cheaper and faster. Soon the symbol is everywhere, detached from the substance that generated it, doing the job of a shortcut rather than a signal.

People are spending 33.5 hours per week consuming online media, around 20% of their waking lives. In that volume of content, the pattern-matching becomes aggressive. Audiences get very good, very quickly, at recognising when a symbol is borrowed rather than lived.

59% of people don’t trust social media as a source of information when researching new tech and innovations. That scepticism extends to brand content generally. The more a symbol circulates, the less it signals anything useful.

The friction problem

There’s a deeper issue here about what meaning actually requires. Interpretation is friction. Understanding why something is real, who made it, under what conditions, with what intention, takes effort. That effort is part of what makes the result valuable. Symbols that bypass this friction don’t just feel hollow; they actively erode the shared sense of what real looks like.

As Samira Larouci wrote in Creative Review, “The internet isn’t dead. It’s congested. Overcrowded with material engineered to circulate and monetise, even as attention thins and audiences quietly withdraw”.

When every brand claims authenticity, the word stops helping anyone decide who to trust. And when the symbols we share as humans are hollowed out, people start to assume every message is slightly unreal.

Brands pushing back

Some brands have responded by making the rejection of hollow symbols into a position in itself, doing it in ways that feel grounded rather than performative.

Aerie pledged to exclude AI-generated bodies and unretouched images from its advertising. When their Instagram post declaring “No AI. Real people only. 100% Aerie Real” became their most liked post of the year, it wasn’t because “real” is a magic word. It was because the commitment was specific, verifiable and consistent with years of prior behaviour.

Dove extended its decades-old Real Beauty platform into the AI era by pledging never to use AI to generate or distort images of women, and backing that pledge with practical resources like inclusive prompting guidelines. Again, the credibility came from specificity and track record, not from simply claiming authenticity.

Heineken responded to AI “friend” wearable ads with a billboard pairing a bottle opener with the line “The best way to make a friend is over a beer.” Cadbury’s Make AI Mediocre Again campaign imagined data being pumped into AI training systems to deliberately slow them down, reframing imperfection and doing nothing as inherently human values.

What these campaigns share isn’t an aesthetic or a tone. It’s a clear, legible position that emerges from something the brand actually does or actually believes, with enough specificity to be verified rather than just felt.

What this means for brand communication

The implication isn’t to stop using the language of care, community or craft. It’s to earn it differently. Symbols need grounding in tangible, visible touchpoints, not just messaging. Showing process, context and intention increases perceived legitimacy because it gives people something to evaluate, not just feel.

Cultural fluency requires lived-in judgement. Brands that protect depth, friction and authorship create distinction in an environment of hollow circulation. Meaning needs stewardship, not extraction.

The question to ask of any piece of communication: what exactly is this asking the audience to believe, and what evidence have we given them to make that belief reasonable?