The Frontier of Fake
How to think about authenticity in business.
BY JOE PINE & JIM GILMORE; reprinted from the thinkAbout Times

No tourism destination is completely natural, having been manufactured to create a certain effect that increases the chances tourists will love the place and want to spend time there. A comparison of The Venetian (the hotel and casino artificially placed in Las Vegas) vs. Venice (the city artificially maintained in the Adriatic Sea) illustrates the point well.

Venice
Venice has sunk over five inches in the past one hundred years while the sea has risen over four inches, leading to troublesome flooding during high tides. The local government has started to install a system of over seventy sea gates to control the water levels from the Venice Lagoon into the city’s famous network of (artificial) canals. One potential casualty: the local supply of fish unique to the brackish environment where the salt water meets the fresh. It’s already
become customary at some of the lesser fishmongers to slap nostrano labels, falsely indicating “ours”, on seafood from other locales as far-flung as Morocco or Spain. Tuna comes from Indonesia and turbot from fish farms in the Netherlands.

Cesare Benelli, proprietor of one of the better restaurants, Al Covo, and organizer of an alliance “dedicated to the preservation of local culinary traditions” using “authentic local ingredients”, laments in : “It’s a war, finding fresh, local fish. Only 53,000 of us are left here, and I worry that we’re losing our identity as Venetians. Much more than our fish – our collective memories, our dialect, our culture, our flavors and our tastes.”

Indeed, every year more and more citizens flee the city and its diminishing local culture to live at higher elevations, decreasing the everyday ratio of residents to tourists. The past mayor of Venice, Paolo Costa, said elsewhere in The Times of his worry about what a continued exodus might mean to the place: “It would be like you were in Williamsburg.” To put his comment in perspective, former Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable singles out Colonial Williamsburg in her book Unreal America as “a careful construct. . . where one could learn a little romanticized history, confuse the real and unreal, and have – then and now – a very nice time”. Her main criticism: Williamsburg lies “frozen in time”, restored to an arbitrary date in the past.

But does that not already describe Venice? Thanks to current and past mayors and the decisions they’ve made, the City of Dreams remains artificially rooted firmly in the past – in order to attract the very tourists that are driving away the real residents. As late architecture professor Steen Eiler Rasmussen says in his book Experiencing Architecture, “Venice itself looms like a mirage, a dream city in the ether. And this impression of unreality persists even to the very threshold.”

Fake Venices The Referential authenticity of The Venetian in Las Vegas.	Fake Venices The famed canals of the fake Venice.

vs. The Venetian
Ah, Venice. Meanwhile, in Las Vegas sits The Venetian. Its owner, Sheldon Adelson, often boasts that folks enjoy his hotel and casino precisely because of its “authentic” representation of Venice, right down to the knock-off gondoliers singing renditions of Italian songs while “pushing” their ersatz gondolas back-and-forth (while actually they glide on tracks) across an artificial canal that sits a floor above the casino. Adelson told the Casino Journal “We believe [Las Vegas hotel & casino] New York-New York is a ‘faux’ New York. We are not going to build a ‘faux’ Venice. We’re going to build what is essentially the real Venice.”

W. Easley Hamner, principal with The Venetian’s architects, The Stubbins Associates, Inc., extended his client’s vision when he told Inland Architect Magazine, “By visiting the Venetian, millions of people who might never have the opportunity of seeing the real Venice can experience at least a portion of its romance and learn of many of its qualities.... Based on public and media reactions, the quality of materials, the experience of the Venetian, and its verisimilitude all seem unexpected. Unlike other destination resorts in the area, the marble is real, the columns and facades three dimensional, and the entire experience unique.”

Professional humorist P. J. O’Rourke picked up on Adelson’s comments to contrast the authenticity of the two places in the pages of Forbes FYI back in 2000: “But is the Venetian ‘essentially the real Venice’? For a Venice that’s on the wrong continent, in the middle of a dust bowl and was built last year, the Venetian is surprisingly authentic. The Campanile, for instance, is fake, but so’s the one in really real Venice. The original Campanile, completed in 1173, collapsed in a heap in 1902, and a replica was constructed in its place.”

O’Rourke’s observation of the obvious does little to persuade most people that Venice itself is as inauthentic as The Venetian, let alone that The Venetian can make any claim to being as authentic as Venice itself. People know the two places differ not just in degree but in kind. (As our editor at Harvard Business School Press told us, “Only a rat cannot detect the difference between the two places.”) But this comparison provides little insight into how some places (like any object) gain a reputation for authenticity while others do not. Frankly, a more relevant comparison exists in comparing competing Vegas resorts. In Las Vegas – an entire city arguably themed as “Anything Goes” – just why do some venues attract more guests than others? Why does The Venetian thrive while Aladdin Hotel & Casino, for example, fell into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, replaced by a Planet Hollywood casino?

The difference seems to be what consumers perceive in terms of authenticity. One sees The Venetian honoring Venice with it own version of St. Mark’s Square and other self-determined “Italian” traditions; whereas one would walk into Aladdin and – despite its outward motif – immediately ask, “What’s it supposed to be?” The Venetian says to guests, “We know what we are, and you know it too.”

This can be illustrated with a personal experience we encountered on a gondola ride at The Venetian during our 2001
thinkAbout event. After finishing a rousing aria, our gondolier responded to our applause by saying “Grazie, grazie” followed by a perfect rendition of Elvis’ famous line – “Thank you. Thankyouverymuch” – in effect, genuinely winking at Las Vegas’ entertainingly authentic inauthentic self. Time and again, visitors encounter features at The Venetian that resonate with those who come to Vegas seeking escape from the humdrum strip malls, service stations, and suburban sameness of everyday life. For them, it all comes off so real. Really. As O’Rourke concludes, “Most of the things that aren’t authentic about the Venetian’s Venice are, like the smell, an improvement.”

Our Worldview and Welcome to It
Things do not always seem as they are. As human beings today we mold not just our landscape, but increasingly our talk, our actions, our experiences – the very lives that we lead – in such a way that everything today is part of a reality we manufacture ourselves. This holds especially true for the economic offerings we create as businesses. Despite all the companies slapping “real” and “authentic” all over their products, nothing that’s offered by businesses is really authentic; it’s all artificial, manmade, and fake. Despite how much consumers today desire authenticity in a world of paid-for experiences, businesses can’t manufacture authenticity out of thin air; it’s not possible.

We realize these are bold statements. Not everyone will agree – particularly those responsible for designing, making, or
marketing offerings that must appeal to the new consumer sensibility of authenticity. To see why these statements are correct – and what then businesses must do as a result – we need to take a brief detour into philosophy. Before we do so, it’s important to note some context. Philosophers and social critics discuss authenticity from a single, solitary viewpoint: that of the individual human being. While understanding where this concept entered cultural consciousness is crucial, it’s not where we’re coming from. The world we write about is the world of business.

There is also a strain of thought on authenticity that follows from the above, that of the authentic leader in business. That also is not our concern here. Yes, leaders must be equally authentic in our modern-day times, but our interest revolves around the authenticity of economic offerings themselves and by extension the businesses that offer them. Our method, as with the concepts of Mass Customization and the Experience Economy before this, lies in observing what is going in the business world, identifying far-reaching changes that threaten accepted ways of thinking, and then developing frameworks to enable executives, managers, and workers to see these changes in a new light and thereby figure out what to do about it. And that means we have to get – at least a bit – philosophical.

The place to start: with Lionel Trilling, the late professor of English at Columbia University, who in 1970 presented a series of lectures on the subject at Harvard University that were compiled into the tome Sincerity and Authenticity. He sets himself the task of describing how the notion of sincerity from centuries past transformed over time into our present-day concern for authenticity.

For Trilling, authenticity “implies the downward movement through all the cultural superstructures to some place where all movement ends, and begins.” It is the alpha and omega of modern-day man’s conception of self, which Trilling recognizes in his discourse as he moves from discussing the “idea of sincerity” to the “ideal of authenticity”.

Trilling observes, most tellingly, that “from [Jean Jacques] Rousseau we learned that what destroys our authenticity is
society – our sentiment of being depends upon the opinion of other people” and that for Rousseau, who wrote of the “noble savage”, authenticity consisted in “merely being not inauthentic”. Such negation, in fact, drives much of how authenticity has come to be conceived and defined today.

Within Trilling’s lectures (as well as other such studies) we detect three distinct ways in which social philosophers negatively define authenticity:
• That which is not monetary – Trilling says, “Money, in short, is the principle of the inauthentic in human existence.” In other words, commercializing any activity yields the inauthentic.
• That which is not mechanical – Trilling says, “It was the mechanical principle, quite as much as the acquisitive principle [i.e., using money] . . . which was felt to be the enemy of being, the source of inauthenticity.” In other words, altering the natural order with machines yields the inauthentic.
• That which is not of Man – Trilling says, “We understand a priori that the prescriptions of society pervert human existence and destroy its authenticity.” In other words, qualifying one’s choices by the norms of society (Mankind with a capital M) yields the inauthentic.

Of course, the first two negations follow from the third, as both money and machines are manmade devices, created within and supportive of society.

Thus we can see the obvious but nonetheless startling conclusion: Nothing offered by any business is authentic; it’s all artificial and fake, being monetary, mechanical, and of Man. The moment humans alter the created (“natural”) world, the resulting product is manmade and hence inauthentic. Sell that product and it’s doubly so – money being that manmade device representing the human effort expended in altering the natural world. And what business today can produce any output – even an experience – without resorting to some mechanical means? Clearly, if any business – as a manmade, mechanically dependent, monetary-seeking enterprise – creates an offering, then that offering by its very nature is indisputably inauthentic.

Realize, too, that there is no such thing as an inauthentic experience because that experience happens inside of us (including our experience of using all the different kinds of economic offerings). If we – as human beings – experience an offering, then that experience by its very nature remains inherently authentic (as long as in any sense we remain authentic human beings). But if a business – as a manmade, mechanically dependent, monetary-seeking entity – creates an offering, then that offering by its very nature is inherently inauthentic.

And yet, as human beings we experience offerings every day that we view as authentic. As consumers, we view marble – cut, polished, and tumbled as it might be – as authentic in a way that vinyl flooring could never be. We view thick, pulpy orange juice – even though it was machine-squeezed and comes out of paper container – as authentic in way that frozen orange juice could never be. We view Archer Farms Honey & Nut Toasted Oats cereal – even though the real almonds were machine-cut and the honey likely farmed – as authentic in a way that Kellogg’s Froot Loops could never be.

The Authenticity Paradox
Despite the fact that all these offerings at their core are inauthentic, nonetheless consumers view them as authentic, or at least more authentic than the alternatives. The businesses that offered them were thus able to create the perceptions of authenticity in the minds of consumers, and again the best word to describe this process is render. And rendering one’s offerings more authentic requires embracing this essential paradox: Philosophically speaking (better tighten those seatbelts!), all human enterprise is ontologically unreal – that is, in its very being, it is inauthentic; and yet, much output from that enterprise is phenomenologically real – that is, perceived as authentic by the individuals who buy them.

This authenticity paradox lies at the core of thinking about authenticity in business. Indeed, individuals long for authenticity, but struggle with how to gain it. Businesses long to fulfill that need by selling authenticity, but cannot really provide it. Consumers do perceive many offerings – as they do countries, cities, and nature – as authentic, so enterprises can somehow manage to render the perception of its unreal output as real – and with authenticity becoming the new consumer sensibility, companies must learn how to render their offerings as real.

The primary philosophical question at hand, then, is this: How does something really unreal come to be perceived as real? However, we are not philosophers. We are business thinkers, and our mission, therefore, lies in helping those in business generate practical new ideas for creating economic value from their offerings and thereby satisfy the desires, wants, and needs of their customers. Doing so today means, to rephrase the above, getting customers to perceive your inherently inauthentic offerings as undeniably authentic.