Can a brand be autotelic?

Is this a better mission than 'authenticity'?

This article is inspired by a podcast conversation I discovered this week. As much as I am depressed by the state of social media, a seed of belief in its value does remain (a remnant of my positive memories of social from 2007 - 2015).

This podcast is an interview with Jack Conte, successful YouTuber and CEO of Patreon. Jack’s take on the state of social media was the most honest I’ve heard from any tech CEO in the last few years. His continued enthusiasm and transparency is infectious.

Amongst the many interesting things he said was an assertion that, to be a truly successful creator, it really helps to be autotelic.

autotelic; (adj) - having a purpose in and not apart from itself

Oh, there’s that word purpose, synonymous with brand. But we’ll come back to that.

There are a couple of interesting use cases of the word autotelic.

One is its use as the description of a flow state, where a natural positive fluency occurs because our mind isn’t concerned with the outcome, we’re just enjoying the moment.

The second is in relation to crime. Some criminal acts are described as autotelic because the criminal isn’t concerned with the result, simply in whether their method of committing it ‘works’ and pleases them, as they perform it.

I’m always interested in concepts where morality takes a back seat. Where a mode of being can be used for both good or evil. This suggests a universality that can be applied to business.

Its application to an individual creator is easy enough to envisage now we understand the term. But my question to myself was:

Can you scale that? Could a strategist, such as I, develop a brand that would take that state and engender it into a whole business and its customers , such that everyone finds purpose in the act of doing and transacting?

This seems to fit very well with my worldview of brand as connectivity (not as position, as many would have you believe).

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Autotelic > Authentic

In thinking about what an autotelic state signals, it struck me that this is perhaps what people are striving to express when they use the much-abused term brand authenticity.

Because authenticity is about truth. And value, in business terms, is never true, never absolute. It’s always relative.

This makes people uncomfortable. If value is ever-shifting, what can be relied upon, be foundational? This is why the notion of authenticity is so appealing.

But an autotelic state, where we do what we do for it’s own sake, seems more easily bindable to behaviours. It’s not intrinsic, but it is understandable and repeatable. It’s a groove, a mode you can practice and others can join you in.

This seems to me to speak to the more fan-oriented and collaborative direction in which brand is headed and which technology can positively enable (if we use it for good rather than evil).

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Practicing not preaching

To return to the subject of brand purpose, we know the dangers of lofty ideals. Read Nick Asbury’s book ‘The Road to Hell: How purposeful business leads to bad marketing and a worse world’ for more on that.

I’ve had some experience with employer branding and I know this is where it tends to run out of steam, via an inability to connect everyday employee behaviours to brand purpose. I often refer to this zinger from Slack’s brand guidelines:

“We are deliberately human — we aim to be an ideal colleague.”

Super helpful intent there.

Instead of such bland mush, I can see how creating an autotelic aspect of an employer brand could be very useful to signalling to people what core behaviours will create success. It’s a good antidote to the obsession with ‘why’ that Simon Sinek fans never moved beyond.

There is an interesting, but subtle, difference between the questions “why do we do this?” and “why do we get out of bed to do this every day?”. The first question is really only for founders. The second applies to a whole team and the relationships between them that are constantly in flux.

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Bringing customers into the groove

If this theory has practical application as part of an employer brand, what of the customer-facing identity?

As I mentioned above, the future of branding is behavioural and collaborative. If a team has a clear autotelic sense, is doesn’t seem a great stretch to signal that to prospects and customers.

This seems particularly applicable to B2B services, where the extent to which a client enjoys the working relationship is paramount to retention. Of course clients will always be primarily outcome-driven, but the client’s project lead and project owner do not often have exactly the same worldview.

This has caused me to be more careful in how I express some of my own views. I’ve lost count of the numbers of times I’ve told my clients “If you are a done-for-you service, stop telling people about the ‘how’ so much, they really don’t care”.

I still believe that’s valuable advice in theoretical terms, prospective clients do not want to explore all your first principles in order to value you, the trap experts love to fall into. But that’s not the same thing as signalling what is good about the experience of working together.

The person who has most frequent contact with you is the person who wants the work to embellish their role and credentials. Sharing a sense of love for the process and giving them confidence is very persuasive in that regard.

Even if it’s more passive, say in a restuarant setting, it doesn’t surprise me that some high-end eateries have done very well by opening sightlines to the kitchen and signalling that the premium experience is to sit near the chefs and watch them at work, in their autotelic state.

The fact investigated in this excellent article, that hospitality has boomed via a desire for social content about the “how”, gives further proof that customers want more than the consumptive experience.

They want to come into our world, experience craft, and feel what we feel in the doing of it. Brand as a shared autotelic state. I think it’s worthy of putting into practice.

I’m ready to do that work, when you are.
Reach me via LinkedIn, or the Exodus 25 website.