Brand Authenticity Strategy: Jonatan Södergren

Jonatan Södergren is a cultural branding strategist working at the intersection of academia, industry, and music. He combines the rigor of a PhD in brand management from Stockholm University with hands-on experience in PR, A&R, and cultural writing across Europe's music industries — including work with international labels such as Secretly Canadian, Rough Trade, and Warp. His career has been shaped by one recurring question: how brands, artists, and audiences create meaning together. He continues that research today at the University of Bristol.

We spoke with him about why brand authenticity strategy is so widely misunderstood, what actually separates brands that earn lasting cultural credibility from those performing it, and where brand strategy is heading.

Working in PR shaped how Södergren thinks about marketing more broadly. He sees it fundamentally as marketing communication — the work of communicating meaning to customers. "I think that is what PR is really about as well," he says.

Brand authenticity is not something a brand can claim on its own — it's something a consumer decides. According to Södergren's research, a brand becomes authentic when its stories resonate genuinely enough with culture that people interpret it, rather than merely perform it, as credible.

That short definition holds up, but Södergren is quick to point out that the concept is far less settled than it sounds. He opens his own research with a nod to Jacques Derrida, who argued that authenticity is a term that endlessly defers its own meaning. The difficulty isn't incidental — it's structural. Both halves of the phrase, "brand" and "authenticity," carry multiple, often conflicting meanings on their own.

Long before it meant anything to marketers, Södergren explains, it meant something much more literal. "It's from the Proto-Germanic Swedish word for fire — you burn your mark into cattle to show belonging," he says. "This cow belongs to this farmer. That was the initial use of brand."

With the rise of mass consumption, a brand became something simpler: a way for consumers to make sense of the products in front of them on a supermarket shelf — a source of information, focused on the product rather than any deeper meaning attached to it. The idea of brand as a resource in its own right — what marketers now call brand equity — is a much later invention. Södergren traces it to the late 1950s and the work of Sidney Levy, whose paper The Product and the Brand helped shape thinking that went on to influence David Ogilvy. "The idea of brand really comes from the academic literature," he notes.

"Authenticity" carries its own instability. Its Greek root — autos (self) combined with authentikos — means something closer to "self-made" than "real."

That etymology creates an immediate paradox for any brand authenticity strategy: brands, by definition, are things people use to construct an identity that isn't entirely their own. "If you're an authentic person, you do things for yourself — you don't rely on brands to construct your identity," Södergren says. That's the paradox at the center of brand authenticity strategy.

On its own, no. Authenticity, in Södergren's framework, is never something a brand simply asserts. "It's definitely co-created. You as a brand can't just claim to be authentic — the consumer has to interpret the brand as authentic." That process plays out differently depending on which model of branding is in play. A brand-personality approach treats authenticity as consistently embodying a certain character — sincere, reliable, wild — the way a person might. A relationship approach treats a consumer's connection to a brand as comparable to a relationship with another person. Both differ from the earlier, more rational model of branding, where a brand functioned mainly as a source of information to help consumers navigate a crowded market efficiently — a model Södergren sees as limited in explaining most real consumption behavior.

The approach he found most useful in his own research is the cultural one: a brand becomes iconic — a word he treats as close in meaning to authentic, in this specific cultural-branding sense — by performing stories that resonate with consumers at a cultural level, often addressing ideological shifts happening in society more broadly. "There are certain anxieties that emerge in every given era, and some brands tell stories that make consumers feel better about their identities in light of these anxieties. Over time, they become iconic."

Södergren names two misconceptions in particular. The first is treating authenticity as synonymous with "the real thing." He distinguishes object authenticity — whether something is the genuine article, relevant mainly to provenance and luxury goods — from existential authenticity, a subjective feeling that something is real, regardless of whether it objectively is. He also points to a third, related distinction from semiotics: indexical authenticity, where an object has a literal, physical link to what it represents, versus iconic authenticity, where something merely resembles the real thing closely enough to stand in for it. His example: Queen Victoria's actual chair, too fragile for display, replaced by an identical reproduction — the reproduction is iconic, not indexical, yet often reads as more authentic to visitors because it looks the way people expect the original to look. He extends this to a more striking case: the popular image of Cleopatra wearing blue eyeshadow is historically inaccurate — ancient Egypt had no minerals to produce that pigment — yet the image, drawn from a 1960s film adaptation, is now so culturally embedded that an accurate depiction would feel less authentic to most audiences, not more. "Authenticity is often related to imagination rather than the real."

The second misconception is assuming authenticity is inherently positive. Södergren argues this deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets — in authenticating one story or myth, a brand can implicitly erase other, equally valid ones.

Cultural credibility, in Södergren's research, has little to do with product superiority and everything to do with how convincingly a brand aligns with — rather than manufactures — a real cultural moment.

Good examples of authentic brands are Harley-Davidson and Volkswagen — two brands Södergren points to as having earned cultural credibility in very different ways.

Harley-Davidson's authenticity has little to do with superior engineering and everything to do with the subculture it came to represent — the freedom mythology popularized through film, music, and biker culture, which gave the brand legitimacy within a marketplace community it didn't invent so much as align with.

Volkswagen shows how that cultural positioning can be actively rebuilt over time. To shed its association with Nazi Germany, it repositioned toward a Bohemian audience in New York, and later found new cultural relevance through moments like its 'Da Da Da' advertisement,  which ran during the Ellen coming-out episode in 1997. Each shift worked, Södergren argues, because it engaged credibly with a real cultural moment — not because the brand manufactured the moment itself. "If you try to capitalize on big cultural moments and come across as a parasite, I think that that can backlash and you can be perceived as very inauthentic."

For Södergren,building brand authenticity is cumulative, not campaign-based — and the reason comes down to a tension he calls brand ambidexterity: holding consistency and relevance together at once. "If you are too consistent without relevance, you become aloof. If you're too relevant without the consistency, you become meaningless."

That tension is also why he's skeptical of attempts to systematize authenticity into a scorecard. "I don't think that there is a one-size-fits-all model for brand authenticity." He gives a direct example: elite cultural references — the kind that would signal sophistication for a luxury brand — would do a brand like BrewDog "no favors." Strategy has to start with a specific brand's actual position in its market and culture, not a universal formula.

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Södergren frames this as part of a longer historical drift. For decades, brand authenticity was built almost entirely on countercultural mythology — individual freedom pushed against the bureaucracy of mass society. He points to Apple's 1984 ad, directed by Ridley Scott and drawing on Orwell's novel, as the clearest expression of that myth: technology framed as a tool for individual autonomy against a faceless, conformist system. "That was the myth of the individual, the rebel."

More recently, he says, that myth has shifted from the individual toward the collective — brand authenticity increasingly built through demonstrations of responsibility and care for marginalized communities rather than individual rebellion. He connects this shift directly to "washing" discourse: greenwashing, pinkwashing, and the broader pattern of brands taking public positions on sustainability and social issues.
 

Since publishing his major literature review in 2021, Södergren has been watching how AI-generated content is saturating advertising. One possible response, he suggests, is a swing back toward the original meaning of "authentic" — work that is visibly human-made. But he holds that idea loosely rather than as a firm prediction: words shift meaning over time, and he points to the historical drift between sincerity and authenticity — once interchangeable, now describing different things — as a reason authenticity itself may simply come to mean something new as AI becomes a normal part of how brand content gets made.

His broader advice doesn't reduce to a tactic. Authenticity can't be quantified or templated — attempts to build universal scoring models for it, he says bluntly, don't hold up. What does hold up is brand-specific cultural literacy: understanding a brand's actual position in culture, the myths it's already carrying, and the myths it can credibly claim.

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Södergren points to The Cure, touring again this year, and specifically to Robert Smith's public criticism of ticket pricing practices — a gesture he reads as a form of brand activism that lands specifically because it appears to come from personal conviction rather than calculated positioning. "For something to be perceived as authentic, it needs to come across as someone doing it out of their own free will, rather than what you'd call performative."

It's not really about the band staying the same, either. "In many ways they are not the same band as back in the eighties," he says. "It's not the same members. But obviously Robert Smith is still in the band, and I think that probably is all that matters." What sustains authenticity over decades, in his view, isn't consistency of output — it's a thread of continuity people can still recognize and trust.

That distinction, he adds, is also part of why formal "authenticity indexes" can be misleading. "Authenticity becomes almost synonymous with legitimacy, iconicity, the real thing — all these things that are part of the concept."

Which is also why Södergren resists reducing authenticity to a formula at all. "It's a very qualitative rather than a quantitative subject. You really need to immerse in the specific brand and think about what would make this brand authentic. You can't quantify it." Two brands operating in the same category, even the same genre, can require entirely different cues to be perceived as credible — a point he illustrates by comparing Shakira and The Cure, whose respective claims to authenticity, he notes, "might be different" from one another despite both being musicians with decades-long careers. What works for one brand's long-term cultural position may say nothing useful about another's. Authenticity isn't a formula to find — it's a discipline to practice, brand by brand. That's the future of brand strategy.