“Image is everything,” declared Andre Agassi in a highly successful marketing campaign for Canon in the 1990s. At the time, the tennis icon was viewed as an iconoclastic rebel—an image the camera-maker leveraged for its own Rebel brand. But as we later learned from Agassi’s tell-all autobiography, the image didn’t really match reality.
Today’s always-on social and mobile savvy consumers are no longer willing to accept inconsistencies between the image a brand projects and the reality of what it represents. A recent study by the PR agency Cohn & Wolfe reveals that a great majority of customers around the world expects brands to be honest and authentic…
