Authenticity will define 2012 - Brilliant words from Wally Olins

So what do we really want – cheap and nasty, or responsible, sustainable and authentic?In October 2011 Asda lowered its prices. Again. 3,000 products had their prices slashed and there was a special offer: spend £40 this week and you get £5 off the next £40 you spend. Tesco also cut prices like crazy and Sainsbury had ‘brand match’ – whatever you cut, we’ll cut too. Even Waitrose started comparing prices – in a rather genteel way, of course. As for Aldi and Lidl – don’t ask. Christmas and post-Christmas was a price-cutting bonanza. And it hasn’t stopped.As household incomes go down, shoppers get much more careful and prices come down too. Chickens – £1.99. What kind of a chicken can you get for £1.99? Only one that has been tortured to grow fat since its birth six weeks ago.When things get tight nobody wants to know anymore about factory farming and all its associated ghastliness. It’s all been quite forgotten – at least for the time being. Nobody is interested in the pressures on suppliers either. We don’t want to know about sheep farmers going bankrupt as long as lamb prices stay low in our supermarket. It’s price, price, price at the moment.So, does this mean that responsible, sustainable, local, authentic, organic was a brief fad – that now with the nation in an apparently profound and long recession we recognize it was a dream? I don’t think so. Somehow or other organic products keep on getting more shelf space and supermarkets still like to talk about their loyal suppliers with their local roots. Farm shops still flourish. Authentic, organic, local – all that stuff is still in the frame – if only just.So, what’s going on? Do we want cheap and greasy on Monday and higher quality and tasty on Wednesday? Of course we’re conflicted. Of course we want both at the same time, or at least in rapid succession. But it doesn’t look to me as though ‘environment’, ‘sustainable’, ‘natural’, ‘organic’, ‘fresh’, ‘local’ have been chucked out of the window. On the contrary, wherever you walk – even in the tawdriest supermarkets – you see these words popping up. And it isn’t just supermarkets either. It’s everywhere.McDonald’s, always a bellwether where public taste is concerned, has been going green literally for the past couple of years. Although McDonald’s still retain what they risibly call their ‘ Golden Arches’, the facias have changed colour from a startling scarlet that looked like it was bursting a blood vessel to a profoundly bucolic green. It’s so green you expect to see cows walking all over the interiors. So presumably McDonald’s have researched themselves silly in their efforts to find out where to go and what to do and they’ve taken the view that the environmental values are here to stay. And they have modulated their branding to match.For what it’s worth, that’s my view too. Right now business is terrible – there’s one economic crisis after another and everybody, except bankers, is looking to save some cash. Even Goldman Sachs incurred a loss recently. Terrible isn’t it? Budgets are going down and everybody is shopping around for a bargain so a lot of branding is emphasising price.But in the longer term I feel sure there has been a profound change in the way we think about ourselves in relation to the environment and particularly in relation to food. All those Heston Blumenthals and Jamie Olivers and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstalls are not just talking to themselves. We are moving towards what you might call ‘authenticity’. We want things to be real, we want things to be properly crafted, we want things to taste as though they come from somewhere. And that’s having a big impact on branding.There are a number of different and apparently separate movements that suggest this. The focus on local foods is one, the power of the celebrity chefs, the encouragement to emulate them at home and the striking success of organics is another. And it isn’t only food. The anti-banking protest movement, Occupy, is another manifestation of the desire to make life a bit simpler, a bit nicer. There is a feeling that we’ve had too much, too much of everything. Too much greed. Too many cars. Too much drink. Too much drugs. Too many clothes.There’s a feeling around that we need a bit less of everything and that we need to find something a bit simpler and more profound and less superficial in ourselves.The post-modern exhibition at the V&A Museum in London exemplifies the era we have just been through that is just ending. Post-modernism was about the rejection of modernism, of form follows function, of simplicity, in favour of fun, excess and exaggeration. And now post-modernism is ending too.Brand builders are an integral part of the dominant contemporary culture. For the last couple of decades many really successful brands have represented, however obliquely, post-modern ideologies – they have been funny, superficial, oblique and maybe a bit fantastic.That era is ending. Now it’s not only about price, it’s also all about authenticity. Where it comes from, who made it, how lovingly it is produced. Country of origin; even city of origin. Staffordshire china.Authenticity is back. Brand builders – you had better recognize that. Tomorrow, I believe, the world will be about authenticity. No more excess. So what does that mean for brands? It means that you have to try to be yourself, you have to try to be restrained, you have to try to be modest, you have to try to be authentic.