works; although I feel sometimes it has led to an artificial leap into CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). This brand has a purpose of X; therefore we need a CSR programme of Y to demonstrate it. “The danger always is of being seen to buy authenticity.” Chipotle has recently been burned by this trend. Having set out its stall under the banner of “food with integrity”, and won over mainstream fast-food customers in the process, the brand suffered a succession of embarrassing food-safety scandals, including a serious outbreak of E. coli and norovirus. While the initial ambition of fresh, locally sourced, high-quality ingredients was a noble one, the company’s inability to consistently deliver on its promise has undermined the integrity of its brand positioning. The punishment? A double-digit decline in stock-market value. The danger, always, is of being seen to buy authenticity. It’s not tradeable. One of the more ill-conceived attempts, and much maligned in the media, is that of Pepsi and the Kendall Jenner ad in 2017. The ad rather crassly traded on protest and tensions surrounding the police in America, two touchy subjects, and implied that all we needed to solve police violence, racial tension, and political anger was an ice-cold Pepsi. The backlash was immediate, multi-channel, and nearly universal. And it was deserved, too. Pepsi has used generational change to underpin its efforts to dethrone Coca-Cola, but greatly missed the mark this time. From Authenticity to Belief We can convincingly demonstrate the power of belief through research. In a study done at Ogilvy & Mather, we compared sets of brands and sorted them into two groups: those with a higher point-of-view rating and those with a lower one. In other words, those that had a belief about the world, or stood for something, and those that didn’t so much. The research supported the notion that belief mattered, since consumers sorted them very clearly via their buying decisions.