Interview with Joe Pine...

 

and stage experience output. If that continues, the concept will devolve and become bastardized.

Pombriant: In your experience, how long does it take for an idea to really penetrate the market to the point that it's well known and influential?

Pine: A lot longer than you think it will! Consider "mass customization" -- a term coined by Stan Davis in 1987 in his path-breaking Future Perfect, when it truly was an oxymoron. I followed that up with my book in 1993, which I subtitled The New Frontier in Business Competition. Well, it took at least another decade for the concept really to take hold, become commonplace, and, in this case, become the new imperative. Just two months ago, for example, I keynoted the fourth annual Mass Customization & Personalization Conference -- a sign that it now is a true movement!

The idea of an experience economy proceeded more quickly than that -- the book sold more than five times as many copies as my first one -- and in many circles was very quickly accepted as the right description of what was going on. Now if we could just get all those economists to ascend to the same proposition.

Standards of Authenticity

Pombriant: You know what they say, if you want three opinions, ask two economists, but I digress. The new book you wrote with Gilmore, Authenticity: What Customers Really Want, delves into how companies let their customers and other stakeholders down when they do things that are out of character for them or just plain off the reservation. You reference companies like Enron and Tyco and many others as examples, and I think we can understand just from the connotations associated with those names that these companies messed up big time. There are a lot of other companies that do things that are not as egregious but nevertheless manage to disappoint customers, employees, the finance community and others -- and tarnish their reputations in the process. Is there a common thread here?

Pine: Absolutely, and it is that while companies today are afraid of all the fakes from China, so often they produce their own counterfeits and do things to get their offerings perceived as inauthentic. They do so by providing offerings that violate one or both standards of authenticity that we've identified: being true to itself, and being what it says it is to others.

Pombriant: Is that what it means to be inauthentic?

Pine: Yes, with the understanding that authenticity is personally determined -- we decide for ourselves what is and is not authentic -- and therefore the same offerings and same actions may be viewed by different people in different ways.

Pombriant: What can companies do to systematically avoid the kinds of calamities that make headlines?

Pine: As an aside, I find it interesting how you phrased each of the last two questions in the negative -- which is exactly what philosophers have been doing for centuries, defining not authenticity but its opposite, and then essentially saying, "Don't be that."

Companies need to systematically examine their decisions, actions and, especially, their offerings with this new lens of authenticity. In this sense, authenticity is the new quality -- it is a new management discipline, one that we are only now beginning to define, explore and delineate. Just as poor quality was the source of many calamities in the past -- and in response, companies developed rigorous tools and techniques for managing quality that have dispersed across all industries -- now companies must develop the same sort of rigorous tools and techniques for rendering authenticity. Our book is but the start.

Jumping on the Bandwagon

Pombriant: We're already seeing some companies jumping on the authenticity bandwagon, but I wonder how closely they are staying to the concept. For example, some are highly self-referential -- like Chevrolet with its campaign, "Genuine Chevrolet" or Levi's with "Authentic blue jeans." Can a company be authentic while being so clearly self-referential?

Pine: Well, again, it's not a concept we've invented, only discovered, and if companies hadn't been addressing the issue, we never would've made that discovery! And in many ways, it's a bandwagon already much further along than when I wrote Mass Customization, or even when The Experience Economy came out.

But we think it a grave mistake for such companies as you point out to use the terms "authentic" or "real" in their advertising or packaging copy. Think, if the first time we met, the first words out of my mouth were "I just want you to know how authentic I am as a human being." Your reaction would be to retreat posthaste! Companies shouldn't say they or their offerings are authentic; they should render them to be perceived as authentic.

Pombriant: In Authenticity, you state that everything manmade is "fake, fake, fake," but that covers a lot of territory. The human mind is responsible for all this fakery, but it is also necessary for perceiving something as authentic. Is there an inherent contradiction here?

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