I confess I’ve been remiss about blogging. My head has been full of other things, and the blog fell by the wayside for a while.

So last week I was talking to a cowboy, bemoaning my lack of blogging. He said, “Blog about me!” He was kidding, but I looked at him and realized he was a great inspiration for a blog about marketing because he’s so darn authentic. He is who he is, he doesn’t pretend to be anything else. He’d rather talk about horses and cows than any other topic. He wears his cowboy boots to a swanky downtown dance club in the city. He cruises around in his big old truck with pride. In a word, he is real. And that’s refreshing.

Authenticity is in short supply in our society. As a result, a grotesque amount of boring, generic, corporate sounding copy dominates the marketing landscape. And it all starts to sound the same…

It’s not the bland, generic stuff that grabs the consumer’s attention, however. These poor folks are marketed at all day every day and they stop noticing. In our crowded and cluttered world, it’s the renegade approach of Jones Soda, the viral effect of Nivea’s “soap is dumb” campaign, the innovation of Apple ads that get noticed.

So be willing to be authentic. If you look, act, talk, market like your competitors, then you’re simply one of the many. When you figure out and emphasize your differences, you stand out. There is no many, only you.