Next week on December 6th, Harvard Business School Publishing is co-sponsoring a virtual seminar on Authenticity: Are You Delivering What Consumers Want? It features James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, co-authors of Authenticity: ‘What Consumers Really Want as well as The Experience Economy”. While I am not recommending or endorsing the webinar, I do find the topic one of great interest. The authors state, “Inundated by fakes and sophisticated counterfeits, people increasingly see the world in terms of real or fake. They would rather buy something real from someone genuine rather than something fake from some phony. When deciding to buy, consumers judge an offering’s (and a company’s) authenticity as much as–if not more than–price, quality, and availability.”

Not directly connected to this but also from Harvard Business Press is the posting a month earlier by Bill Taylor, author of the best seller “Maverick at Work” on Emotional Profits. We recently wrote about the importance of brand loyalty in mergers as evidenced by KLM and Air France. This post uses the examples of how Netflix and United Airlines are striving to connect to their customers to achieve a competitive advantage. His premise? Every executive and entrepreneur has to work on the emotional side of business as well as other more traditional criteria to measure success.

Taylor ends his post with three great questions:

Are you sharing your values—or just selling value? How are you engineering for emotion? What’s your psychological contract with customers?

The no-nonsense researchers at Gallup, Inc. are about to release a book, called Human Sigma, that offers a scientific analysis of the power of emotion in business. (An earlier version of their work appeared in HBR.) The core message: There is a big difference in behavior between customers that are “rationally” satisfied with a company and those that are “emotionally” satisfied—and those differences in behavior translate into huge differences in loyalty and profitability.