Who cares about authenticity?
Everyone, as it turns out. Authenticity is something we all crave. We want to feel authentic — the opposite might be experiencing imposter syndrome, I suppose. We want to spend time with people we see as authentic, to build real and genuine friendships and relationships. And we definitely want to engage with and do business with authentic brands.
Perhaps one of the reasons we crave authenticity is the fact that it has become so rare, especially on social media. In fact, authenticity has become so scarce that society has coined the term “post-truth” to describe the time we’re living in. Rather than marking a point in time, it reflects a perception that truth itself is an outmoded concept. And that’s what we are all experiencing in the 2020s. We live in a world in which objective facts are less influential than persuasive emotional appeals, particularly those fueled by rage.
What makes an expert: the rise of the influencer
People consume information about health and healthcare providers largely from social media, word of mouth — and influencers. Celebrities have been setting trends and influencing the public all the way back to the time of gladiators. Wedgwood may have launched the first influencer-inspired marketing campaign when it designed a tea set for the queen of England in 1760. Yet the scope of influencer marketing has never been as broad as it is today when people spend, on average, 2 hours and 24 minutes a day on social media.
At the same time, trust in our cultural institutions and traditional sources of truth and authority have eroded to a frightening degree. Public trust in talking heads in white coats, a staple of healthcare marketing, has eroded dramatically. It is against this backdrop that the idea for Authentic Healthcare Marketing was born. This new book focuses on critical changes that healthcare providers must make when marketing their brands and their services to post-truth era consumers. Healthcare providers must reclaim ground they’ve lost to so-called influencers on Instagram and TikTok by thinking and acting in ways more comfortable to the people they hope to unseat.
Adapt or become irrelevant
Over the last two years, there have been dozens — maybe hundreds — of situations that leave me scratching my head and saying to myself, “Do people really believe that?” It seems to me that sleeping with raw onions in your socks is more likely to drive your partner out of bed than toxins out of your body. This is the sort of social media content we all have to deal with, especially healthcare providers. People have the same level of confidence in the opinions of amateurs and influencers as they do in scientists and experts. Maybe more.
Patent medicines of questionable efficacy have been around since the late 17th century. Lack of access to healthcare and distrust of doctors stemming from high medical mortality rates led to a late 18th and early 19th century boom on these cure-all remedies. Sound familiar? Peddlers of patent medicines relied on newspapers and word of mouth to reach their audiences. However effective they were for the time, they have nothing on the electronic highways that immediately connect millions of users to information. In the last two decades there’s been an explosion of health hacks, home remedies, and medical misinformation, especially since COVID-19. Real scientific expertise has been replaced by the wisdom of the crowd, which unfortunately doesn’t often seem very wise as it relates to healthcare.
There was so much inauthenticity during COVID, and so much damage done to public trust in healthcare. “Alternative treatments” — at least two of which contributed to marked increases in calls to poison control centers — masks, vaccines, you name it. Truth took a backseat to rumor, gossip, and conspiracies. And while consumer behavior was shifting dramatically, healthcare marketers continued to approach their craft much the same way they had in the past.
Opinions don’t make experts, and certainty is not truth
Our anecdotal observations are matched by recent public opinion research, too. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed some troubling statistics:
- 55% of people believe that the government, businesses, and journalists deliberately mislead the public on health-related matters
- 45% of people believe that the average person can know as much about health as a trained doctor
- 38% of people between 18 and 34 are willing to disregard their doctor’s advice in favor of advice from social media
- 43% of people regret a health decision they made based on misinformation
A new report in The Guardian found that more than half of the top mental health TikToks included false information. Some suggested that potentially normal emotional responses were symptoms of borderline personality disorder. Some misused therapeutic terminology — something that happens when untrained people try to deliver clinical advice. Some promoted unsubstantiated treatments for deep trauma, depression, or anxiety. Believing the wrong thing is bad enough. Yet when you compound misplaced beliefs with irreversible choices, the results can be catastrophic.
The world has changed. Healthcare marketing needs to change with it. And that’s the challenge — maintaining authenticity even as we examine our messages, our messengers, and our channels.
To find your audience, expand your search area
It’s vital to understand that people get their information from all kinds of nontraditional sources, such as social media, influencers, podcasts, and heavily biased media outlets. Whatever your personal beliefs, the audiences engaging with them believe they’re truthful and credible. The information landscape has consolidated to distinct ideological poles leaving a huge gulf in the middle. There’s little shared worldview — or even mutually recognized truths or facts. It’s no longer enough to say that four out of five dentists agree. Your audience may not even believe that they’re dentists.
The post-truth era requires a different approach. The mission of every healthcare organization is to deliver high quality care to as many people as possible in the communities they serve. To do that, the organization’s brand and marketing must be authentic. They must reflect their core values, feel real and genuine to consumers, and be borne out in the way the organization appears in the community. And here’s a challenge: marketing must reach everyone the organization serves, and that requires new messages, new messengers, and new channels.
As Unlock Health strategist Luke Bemis wrote earlier this year, “Healthcare organizations serve vital roles in the community. They support people as they strive to live healthier lives and provide life-saving care when needed. But they’re also large employers and supporters of community health initiatives.”
We need to reach all consumers and patients, even when the information and factors that drive them may not be what they would endorse or support. This is especially true for hospitals and health systems that anchor cities and rural communities around the country. Authentic Healthcare Marketing gives healthcare marketers a framework to understand the views of patients and audiences who may see the world differently than you do.
When is authenticity a want instead of a need
Maybe authenticity in some areas of our life is a “nice to have” instead of a “must have.” For adults who recognize them for what they are, the polished, perfect, idealized lives people display on social media are probably fine. Maybe, it’s okay that, as Harvey Milk said, “Politics is theater.”
There is no scenario in which healthcare marketing in the post-truth era can be effective without being authentic. We’ve got the data to prove it, too. We asked 1,000 people if authenticity is important when choosing a healthcare provider — 84% said it was essential or very important. The perception of your brand as authentic could be the difference between people getting the care they need to improve their lives — or not.
Unlock Health is a full-service marketing and communications agency that helps healthcare organizations make authentic connections with patients and communities. Every minute of every day, someone books services they need as a result of our work with clients.
