You Can't Fake People Who Like What They Do

I spent more than twenty years as a journalist before I helped start JAM, and in that time I watched a lot of organisations explain their brand to me.

There was almost always a slide with pillars. Three, sometimes five, occasionally a brave seven. Trust. Innovation. Excellence. Community. The words were always fine.

The problem was that you could have swapped them between any two companies in the room and nobody would have noticed. So when people ask what JAM's brand first principles are, I want to be honest about it. We do have pillars, and they are useful. But the pillars are the easy part. They are the part anyone can copy.

When everything ties back to a small number of values, and you say them out loud often enough that they start to shape decisions. Fine. You pay attention to what catches attention and, more importantly, what holds it. Fine. You work out your timing, your cadence, your platform, the hook that makes someone stop scrolling. Fine. You build systems, the mind-map to content, the way a rough idea becomes a script becomes a post, so the good thinking does not die in your notes app, or notebook. Fine. You let the people in the team have their own profile, their own voice, all of it orbiting the same core. Good. And then there is the last one.

The people themselves. The content feels real because it really is them. That is the one I keep coming back to, because it is the only "pillar" on the list that cannot be bought, briefed or borrowed. You can hand a competitor your entire playbook. The values, the posting schedule, the software stack, the exact hook formula. They can have all of it. But rarely will they be able to replicate it to the fullest extent.

The reason for this is the driving forces in your teams, the leaders who LIKE the work.

Audiences, who are far sharper than most brands give them credit for, can tell the difference in about four seconds. They have spent years being sold to. They know the smell of a person performing enthusiasm they do not feel.

They also know, instantly, when someone is talking about something they care about, because the energy is different. It does not try so hard. This is the bit that frustrates me about a lot of the marketing industry, and it is why JAM is built the way it is.

The whole machine is set up to sell you the copyable parts. Frameworks, templates, ten hooks that went viral. All of it is real, all of it "may" work, and none of it reflects the main point. The frameworks help you build faster. They do not decide whether the initial idea is the right one, often that's much more intuition based.

I learned this as a reporter, long before I had any interest in branding. The best interviews were never the ones individuals who had the slickest media training. You can throw a lot of money at media training and really get nowhere. They were the ones where the person in front of me obviously could not help talking about the thing.

A police officer who lit up describing a community scheme that actually worked. A landlord who knew every regular by name and what they drank. You do not coach that. You either have people who care about what is being discussed or you have people reading lines, and the camera, the page and the audience all know which is which.

So if you are sitting down to plan who you're putting forward as spokespeople for your media strategy, by all means do the pillars. Map your values, sort your cadence, get your systems tidy. That work matters, and skipping it just means doing it badly later. But do not mistake the highest ranking person as being the best person to speak on a topic.

The question to ask is... Do the people doing this work like doing it? Are they passionate? Are you letting them sound like themselves, or are you sanding them down until they sound like everyone else in your category?

You cannot fake people who love what they do. That is the secret to great interviews, and it is the one part no agency, no template and no clever hook will ever sell you. It has to already be there. The job is just to stop getting in its way.

*Martin Buhagiar, co-founder and CEO of JAM Group Media.*