Brands are alienating customers by telling the wrong story and championing a false purpose. Your business can avoid the same fate, attract loyal customers, and out-narrate the competition by embracing authenticity. Equal parts provocation and exhortation, the insights of Authenticity apply to business, marketing, and life in general.

Too many companies depend on marketing tactics that don’t match the needs and concerns of their customers, or embrace messaging and causes that don’t connect. Authenticity is an anti-gimmick business book. It prescribes clear strategies that enable companies to communicate in a more genuine, emotional way.

Authors Mark Toft, Jay Sunny, and Rich Taylor provide a series of approaches to help embrace and communicate the purpose of your brand with effectiveness. Whether you’re a business executive who wants to be more persuasive or an advertising professional looking to grow your brand, this book combines the authors’ successful experiences at top agencies into practical advice that can work for anyone in any business.

Readers will learn the importance of purpose and conflict in marketing activities, how to approach advertising with clarity and passion, and how to plan content while avoiding the false allure of aspirational advertising and insincere corporate social responsibility. Inauthentic messaging can often spell failure for a business, but the company that tells a genuine, compelling story to its clients is the one that succeeds.

See how message makes the difference between success and failure

Find out why cause-related marketing is perilous

Discover why mission statements don’t work

Give yourself permission not to be funny

See why creation is a better motivation than disruption

Find out how authenticity made brands like Airbnb and CrossFit -and inauthenticity is crippling United and Facebook

Learn what the Ramones can teach us all about branding and marketing