What Young People Understand About Authenticity That Brands Keep Forgetting
Young people have an instinct for the real thing that most brands spend fortunes trying to manufacture. It is time to learn from them instead of marketing at them.
There is a particular kind of humility required to admit that the people you are trying to market to understand something about trust better than your marketing department does. But I have come to believe that is exactly the situation most brands find themselves in when it comes to younger audiences. Young people have grown up inside an environment saturated with marketing messages, and as a result they have developed a sharper eye for what is real and what is performance than almost any generation before them.
They have watched influencers, watched brands pivot their values overnight depending on what is trending, watched companies issue statements that clearly came from a legal department rather than an actual belief. And rather than becoming cynical to the point of disengaging entirely, many of them have become extremely good at spotting the difference between a brand that means what it says and one that is simply saying what performs well right now.
What they understand, often instinctively, is something brands keep forgetting on purpose, because forgetting it is often more comfortable than living up to it: authenticity is not a tone of voice. It is consistency between what you claim and what you actually do, over time, even when no one is watching closely.
Mistaking the Aesthetic of Authenticity for the Substance of It
Many brands have responded to the demand for authenticity by adopting its visual and verbal style—more casual language, more behind-the-scenes content, more admissions of imperfection—without changing anything about how the organization actually operates. This produces a kind of authenticity costume: it looks relaxed and honest on the surface, but the underlying behavior, the pricing practices, the customer service, the actual follow-through, remains exactly as calculated and inconsistent as it was before.
Younger audiences, who have seen this pattern repeated endlessly across platforms, are often faster than older audiences at recognizing the costume for what it is. A casual tone does not fool someone who is going to check your actual labor practices, your actual return policy, your actual history of statements on an issue you now claim to care about. The gap between style and substance, which used to be hidden by distance and limited information, is now visible to anyone willing to look, and younger audiences look more often than brands expect.
The deeper problem is that chasing the aesthetic of authenticity without the substance actually damages trust more than saying nothing at all would have. A brand that never claimed to be authentic is simply ordinary. A brand that claimed authenticity and was then caught contradicting it becomes, in the eyes of a skeptical audience, something closer to dishonest.
Jessica LaShawn’s Perspective
In my work with young people, I have learned that authenticity is not primarily a communication strategy. It is an operating discipline. The students and young entrepreneurs I mentor are not impressed by a confident tone. They are watching for whether the person speaking actually behaves consistently with what they claim to value, across contexts, including the contexts where it would be easier not to.
I tell business owners the same thing I tell young mentees: you cannot talk your way into authenticity, you can only behave your way into it, consistently, long enough that people stop needing to question it. That means your internal practices—how you treat your team, how you handle a mistake, how you price your services, what you actually do when no customer is watching—have to match your public voice, because a younger audience, more than almost any before it, will eventually find the places where they do not match.
This is, honestly, good news for brands willing to do the real work. Because it means authenticity cannot be purchased or faked at scale by a competitor with a bigger budget. It can only be built the slow way, which means the organizations willing to build it that way have a real and durable advantage.
Personal Reflection
The young people I have had the privilege of mentoring have taught me far more than I have taught them about what it means to be genuinely consistent, because they do not let inconsistency slide the way adults have learned to. They notice when an adult’s private behavior does not match their public message, and they will often say so plainly, without the diplomatic softening most adults apply.
That kind of honesty has shaped my own commitment to making sure the person I am in a classroom matches the person I am in a boardroom, matches the person I am at home. It is not a performance I put on for whichever audience I am in front of that day. I think that consistency, across every room I walk into, is part of what it means to turn lived experience into service rather than simply into a story I tell. Young people are often the ones who hold that standard up to me most clearly, because they have no patience for anything less.
When Consistency, Not Branding, Earned Trust
Organizations that have maintained consistent values publicly and privately over long periods of time, whatever specific positions they have taken, tend to retain credibility with younger audiences even when those audiences disagree with a particular decision, because the consistency itself signals that the position is genuinely held rather than market-tested. Whatever one thinks of any individual company’s specific choices, the pattern holds broadly: audiences, and especially younger ones, extend more trust to organizations whose behavior has been steady over time than to ones whose stated values shift with the season.
Conversely, organizations that have adopted a cause publicly, only to quietly abandon it once it stopped being advantageous, have often faced sharper and more lasting skepticism from younger consumers than organizations that simply never claimed the cause at all. The lesson is consistent: credibility is built on the follow-through, not the announcement.
Putting this into practice? Explore Academic School SEL Curriculum with Jessica LaShawn.
What the Research Suggests
Pew Research Center’s work on younger generations has documented a strong and recurring preference for transparency and consistency over polish when evaluating institutions, brands, and public figures. McKinsey’s research on personalization and customer experience has similarly found that audiences increasingly expect their actual experience to match whatever a brand claims about itself, and that mismatches are noticed and remembered more than matches are. Together, this research supports a simple conclusion: younger audiences are not harder to reach because they are cynical. They are harder to reach because they are paying closer attention, and attention, once earned honestly, tends to be unusually loyal.
The JLC Earned Attention
How a brand earns trust with a skeptical, attentive audience instead of performing for it.
- Behavior First: Fix the practice before you adjust the tone.
- Plain Claim: Say only what you can actually demonstrate.
- Visible Follow-Through: Let people see the consistency, not just hear about it.
- Honest Correction: Admit and fix the gaps publicly when they appear.
Earned Attention works as a bridge between a brand’s internal reality and its external claim, because the two have to connect before an attentive audience will trust either side. Fixing behavior first ensures the claim that follows is actually true. Making a plain claim, rather than an inflated one, keeps the bridge short and easy to verify. Visible follow-through lets the audience watch the consistency happen rather than simply being told about it. And honest correction, when a gap does appear, repairs the bridge quickly instead of letting it collapse entirely under accumulated small failures.
Brands that build this bridge deliberately find that younger audiences, far from being an unreachable or distracted demographic, become some of the most loyal advocates they have, precisely because that audience was paying close enough attention to notice when the bridge actually held.
What This Means for Your Brand
For your brand, this means resisting the temptation to adopt the tone of authenticity without doing the underlying work. Before you soften your language or add more behind-the-scenes content, ask whether your actual practices—internally and externally—would hold up to the same scrutiny your new tone invites.
It also means recognizing younger audiences as a genuine resource rather than simply a market to capture. Their instinct for inconsistency is, in effect, free and honest feedback about where your brand’s substance has not yet caught up with its style. Listening to that instinct, rather than marketing around it, is often the fastest path to real trust.
Young people are not harder to reach because they do not care. They are harder to reach because they care enough to check whether you meant it.
Build a brand that would survive that checking, and you will have built something that can actually last well beyond whatever is trending this season.
Sources & Further Reading
- Pew Research Center — Pew Research Center
- The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying — McKinsey & Company
- Edelman Trust Barometer — Edelman