gummy texture and mouth feel, then consumers may have failed to credit it as true prosciutto.

If you are aiming at a micro-niche (i.e., connoisseurs) you may need to cater to this purist sense of authenticity. Manga publishers outside Japan originally “flopped” layouts to provide left-to-right reading, but otaku (obsessive fans) demanded the original Japanese right-to-left layout, now the standard. Whether Parma ham or Porco Rosso, the point is that the criteria that ensure authenticity are not a priori; they cannot be reduced to a few fundamental principles that are treated like a checklist. Establishing authenticity is a social and cultural process, one that is negotiated. The elements that carry authenticity shift and change, and where people locate the essence of what they value in a product or service experience evolves over time.

It’s not just the label or branding that is under consideration; there are many components or holistic aspects of the designed experience that can contribute to or detract from its authenticity. When visiting the Portofino Bay Hotel in Orlando (meant to evoke a resort on the Italian Riviera, but felt more like a move-studio lot), we noted Vespa-like scooters parked (installed, actually) around the grounds, and weathered-looking pebbles embedded as stair treads. But the architects took it further, building blank functionless facades to suggest a townscape. And as you might find in old Europe, passageways were narrow and hindered navigation. It felt like a rendered videogame

background before the branding, characters, and gameplay were added. Ultimately, we wanted the hotel’s precious Portofino-ness to get out of the way so we could perform basic way-finding tasks.

Alcohol companies and ( infamously) Sony Ericcson are not shy about using stealth marketing—sending good-looking actors into bars to chat up unsuspecting patrons and extol the virtues of whatever product they are paid to represent. While much of the controversy over Facebook’s Beacon was focused on privacy, there is an aspect of personal authenticity, as it has the potential to post items to a user’s page without their intent or awareness, in essence representing them. This goes even further in Magpie, an advertising service that works with Twitter, where people can be paid for having ads embedded in their tweets.

When dining out, the service plays a crucial role in making the experience great. A great waiter will be your host: guide you, encourage you, joke with you, and generally connect with you. When you walk out the door, you feel good about the interaction you’ve had with someone who gets paid based on how well they induce that feeling of connection. Is that an inauthentic relationship?

There’s a moment early in the Maysles’ documentary “Gimme Shelter,” where after showing us the 1969 audience’s view of Mick Jagger singing, dancing, and giving his all to the performance, the camera moves to the back of the stage and we see Mick looking back at the band and rolling his

eyes, breaking character as he expresses frustration, disdain, or bemusement. From the other side of the filmic proscenium we wouldn’t have even known there was a character for him to break, assuming that emoting singer was who Mick Jagger really was. Does that make his performance inauthentic? By calling it a performance, don’t we assume that it must be built, and therefore not authentic to the individual? As with the waiter, if someone does a good job when they are onstage, and they create a positive response, but that is not who they are when they are offstage, are we surprised or disappointed?

Consider the VW Beetle and its evolving story. We marveled at the 1998 reintroduction of the VW Beetle, which went from its 60s-era meaning of aspirations for hippie-like freedom to a mature reflection on that past (as the drivers of Beetles in 2009 are often the same people who drove them in 1971). Yet this pales to the shift away from the original meaning: Hitler’s “car of the people.” Thomas Frank quotes one of the creatives at DDB (Volkswagen’s legendary U.S. ad agency) as saying, “The cute Volkswagen in 1959 reminded lots of people about the ovens.”

To reinvent the Beetle, DDB launched an unprecedented decade-long anti-advertising campaign that mocked the culture of conspicuous consumption associated with other American cars, differentiating itself by its frugality and mocking other car models’ planned obsolescence by, for example, running a print ad proclaiming over a single photo: “The ’ 51 ’ 52