When authenticity becomes a commodity, what replaces it as the Big Selling Point?

For the last decade, marketing has had an unhealthy fixation on “authenticity.”

Be real. Be raw. Be human. Strip away the polish, let the seams show, invite people behind the curtain. Brands scrambled to sound like friends. Influencers built empires on relatability. Even typos, grainy selfies, and unfiltered rants have become part of the performance.

However, in its overused, excessive state, the mask began to slip. Everyone knows by now that influencers are curated, brand voices are crafted, and that “just like us” moment was probably storyboarded weeks in advance.

And now, with AI writing half the captions, scripts, and ad copy you see, even “authentic voice” feels slippery. Who’s really talking to you?

If everything is curated, if authenticity itself has become a commodity, then what comes after?

Authenticity used to be refreshing because it, unlike anything else, broke the “script.” It was a much-needed departure from stiff, corporate polish. But when everyone is “real,” the performance loses its edge. “Just be yourself” turned into a strategy deck. The wink became the brand. And the brand became, well, just like everyone else.

Which means we’ve now reached a saturation point where audiences don’t just consume content—they consume the mechanics behind it.

They know the game. They can sense the hand of the social media manager. They can smell when “relatable” was rehearsed. We live in a culture that binge-watches behind-the-scenes breakdowns, that shares bloopers more than films, that reads between the lines as a form of entertainment.

You can’t fool them. In that landscape, being “authentic” no longer cuts through.

So, what replaces authenticity?

What becomes the new currency of attention and trust? Well, one possibility is what you might call meta-trust. It’s not about performing realness, but about acknowledging the performance itself.

Brands and creators who come out on top in this era won’t be “acting authentic.” They will own the fact that they are indeed performing. The curtain is already pulled back, so the only move left is to step through it with your audience.

It’s not raw, it’s recursive. Not intimacy, but transparency.

There’s also something deeper at stake here.

Audiences are tired of authenticity as aesthetic. What they are actually searching for is resonance. Content that doesn’t just look or sound real, but that makes them feel seen and understood in a way no algorithm can fake.

Resonance is about speaking to something fundamental. It’s what happens when a piece of writing or a video or a story feels alive to you. Not because it’s unfiltered, but because it touches on a truth that exists outside of performance.

Resonance is cultivated, not manufactured. It comes from curiosity, craft, and the willingness to ask questions bigger than “how do I sound as human as possible?”

We’ve lived through the era of polish, then the era of rawness, then the era of authenticity™. Now we’re entering the post-authenticity era: a time when audiences no longer take words, images, or even faces at face value.

Now, the challenge is not proving you're real. It's proving you’re worth listening to.

What cuts through is not performance but perspective. Not relatability but resonance. Not authenticity but authorship. Because in a world where anyone or anything can generate a convincing facsimile of “real,” the rarest thing left isn’t authenticity. It’s intentionality.

And maybe that’s the new promise: not “this is authentic,” but “this is intentional.”

-Sophie Randell, Writer