When Kentucky Fried Chicken ran out of chicken at its United Kingdom locations in 2018, the company didn’t hide from the blunder. It took out a full-page apology ad with its logo rearranged to spell “FCK,” admitted the mistake, and let the joke land. It’s the kind of recovery that sticks in Nizzi Karai Renaud’s mind years later as a great example of authenticity: not a flawless brand, but one that bridges the gap between what it promises and what it delivers, even when that means owning a very public mess.

Renaud, Chief Brand Officer at Zazzle, the global print-on-demand marketplace headquartered in Menlo Park, California, explored that idea during a fireside chat at a recent From Day One’s July virtual conference. In a discussion moderated by marketing journalist Lisa Lacy, the two examined how brands earn consumer trust by keeping the promises they make, and why authenticity has become such an urgent topic across industries.

Renaud traced the current consumer fixation on authenticity to a widening gap between what companies say, what they do, and what they actually value. “Authenticity is very unique in content, but universal in mechanism,” she said, noting that what feels authentic to Zazzle looks nothing like what feels authentic to a bank, even though the underlying test is the same everywhere. That test, she says, is whether a decision would still make sense traced back through a company’s history, or whether it only makes sense because it happens to be trending.

Tone and alignment are related but distinct, Renaud added. A company’s tone, whether buttoned-up or unhinged on social media, is simply the outfit it wears. Alignment is the character underneath. She pointed to Duolingo’s owl mascot as an example of a chaotic tone that still tracks honestly with the app’s famously persistent reminders. Consumers forgive an unconventional outfit, she said, but not a character that doesn’t add up.

At Zazzle, where customers design and personalize their own products, Renaud says every order is a promise either kept or broken. This makes authenticity as much an operational question as a marketing one. That philosophy shows up internally through what the company calls CHIA: creativity, heart, integrity, and amaze, a shorthand Renaud’s team uses when navigating difficult calls, including content moderation decisions and the rollout of Zazzle’s AI shopping agent, Z.

Trust itself, Renaud says, is built over time through repeated interactions rather than a single standout moment, meaning brands should design for the hundredth customer interaction, not just the first impression. She recommended making fewer promises and keeping them consistently, while also planning in advance for the moments when a company inevitably falls short. Nothing collapses public trust faster than hypocrisy caught out in the open.

Renaud also urged brands to hand storytelling over to their customers rather than narrating on their own behalf. She cited Lego’s fan-designed product line and GoPro’s use of customer-shot footage as examples of companies that let real users become their most credible advocates. The underlying psychological concept, she said, is “mattering,” a framework popularized by the late scholar Isaac Prilleltensky, built on the idea that people need to feel both valued and capable of adding value in return.

As for brands that exemplify sustained trust, Renaud pointed to Costco, a company she described as a quiet master of brand integrity that has avoided reinvention or gimmicks in favor of relentless consistency. “Marketing can just be the mirror, not the mask,” she said. No amount of messaging can manufacture authenticity if the underlying operation doesn’t support it.

In the end, Renaud’s advice circles back to a single idea: authenticity isn’t a campaign a brand launches, but a discipline it keeps. The companies that last, she suggested, are the ones willing to hold their values fixed while everything else, tone, channels, even the tools they build with, keeps changing around them.

Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.

(Photo by skynesher/iStock)