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Pine: We call it the "authenticity paradox." All economic offerings are ontologically -- in their very being -- inauthentic, and yet we as human beings can phenomenologically -- through our senses and perceptions -- view them as authentic. That's why we use the term "rendering," meaning "to make out of whole cloth." Offerings aren't authentic, they are fake, fake, fake, but despite that, you can -- through design, production, packaging, demand-generation, and so forth -- cause customers to perceive them as authentic. That's rendering. Acknowledging InauthenticityPombriant: You like to use the S-curve as a graphical metaphor for the life-cycle of an idea; that's something I like to do too. Where would you say we are on the S-curve for authenticity? Pine: Good question! We've already seen, in many ways, the bastardization of "mass customization" as "customer relationship management," which so often is just better, more precise target marketing rather than truly creating different offerings to meet the individual needs of each customer. And we've seen "the experience economy" bastardized with, naturally, "customer experience management," which so often is about making transactions convenient, easy, nice and quick, rather than truly creating new economic experiences for guests. If our prescriptions in "authenticity" were being bastardized, the first thing you'd expect to see is all the uses of the term in marketing and on packaging that we already see! So, again, it's a bit different, in that with this book we're identifying a concept already in currency and have to get companies to break a few bad habits. Plus, I'm sure there are at least a few folks out there who think that we are the ones bastardizing the term -- the folks who really believe, or really want to believe, that their firms truly are authentic and their offerings real. Authenticity being personally determined, they may very well continue to hold fast to those beliefs. But they fly in the face of all of the philosophical thought on the subject of what is and is not authentic, which we read, researched and applied to businesses and their offerings. As we say in our fourth of five axioms of authenticity, it's easier to render offerings authentic if you acknowledge they're inauthentic. That acknowledgement is really at the beginning of the S-curve; without it, you're probably on a whole 'nother curve entirely. Pombriant: Thanks, Joe. |
