There's a word that shows up at every marketing conference, in every brand strategy deck, on every LinkedIn post about personal branding. You know the one.
The irony is that the more you talk about it, the less of it you have. A brand that announces it's authentic is, almost by definition, not. A person who performs vulnerability is performing. The thing itself resists being packaged.
So what actually is it?
My working definition: authenticity is the distance between perfection and genuineness. Not what you want people to think you are — but what you actually are, including the false starts, the wrong turns, the PhDidn't.
(Yes, that's a real term I use for myself. Water technology degree, a PhD attempt that didn't happen, a career that wandered through pedagogy, science communication, and antibiotic resistance research before landing — somehow — in marketing. It's messy. It's also the truest thing on my CV.)
The feedback loop nobody mentions
Here's what authenticity actually does, when you let it: it attracts people who think like you. Not just on social media — in rooms, in projects, in the kind of work that doesn't feel like work.
The chain goes: authenticity → trust → relationship → community. And once that community exists, you're no longer performing for an audience. You're just being yourself in a room full of people who showed up because of exactly that.
Less professional pretence. More enjoyment. A stronger network — not because you optimised for it, but because you stopped pretending.
When it works
I've seen this play out in ways that shouldn't work but do.
A toxicologist I know posts in slightly cracked English, full of Czech idioms that don't translate. "It is one for me behind me." And yet — or maybe because of it — he's one of the most respected, genuinely liked voices in his field. The imperfection is the point. You trust him because he's clearly not managing his image.
Someone else got hired for a content role by shitposting. Their entire online presence was chaotic, funny, and very much themselves. The company that hired them needed exactly that energy and knew it when they saw it.
A third person sent their CV inside a bottle to a food brand's branding team. Got the job. Could have gone horribly wrong. Didn't.
The common thread: they were legible. You knew immediately who you were dealing with. There was no gap between the packaging and the product.
The elephant in the room
There's a version of LinkedIn where everyone just attended an "insightful" conference, had "inspiring discussions", and left with "actionable takeaways". Where every panel featured "experts highlighting stimulating questions". Where everything is "professionally organised" and something is always "cutting-edge".
You know none of this is real. The people writing it know it isn't real. And yet the posts multiply, because it feels safer than saying: it was fine. Two panels were good. I met one useful person and ate a mediocre lunch.
The honest version is more interesting. It's also more useful to anyone reading it.
And yes — there's a particular kind of hollow language that's started appearing everywhere: superlative adjectives, em dashes, a tendency to say "it's not just X — it's Y. And perhaps even Z." You've read it. You probably know what produces it. The advice is simple: if the text is supposed to come from you as a person, it should come from you as a person.
A few things that actually help
Think about how you want to be seen — then be that thing, not a performance of it. There's a difference, and people can feel it.
Share the process, not just the result. The finished campaign is boring. The brief that went sideways, the line you fought for and lost, the client who turned out to be right — that's the stuff worth reading.
Be personal. Not oversharing — personal. Opinions, dilemmas, things you changed your mind about. That's what builds trust, not a list of credentials.
Find your niche, or let your niche find you. The toxicologist doesn't appeal to everyone. He doesn't need to.
And balance brand with human. You can be recognisable and still be a person. In fact, the best personal brands are just people who are consistently, stubbornly themselves.