When Stagis still existed in it's founding city Odense, some six or seven years ago, my colleague Iben and I would joke about 'old values' and refer to marmelade from The Old Factory (Den Gamle Fabrik), a Danish brand that has an image of historic authenticity and some sort of naturalness. Back then they stood out in their category by promoting the idea of marmelade as it used to be and a strong connection between the product and the organizational identity and the heritage of the company. So when ever Iben and I was to do a project we would refer to them with a glimpse of irony as we weren't going to go THAT far to make any client look oldschool but we certainly wanted to bring out whatever the organization of our client had in their core and heritage.

Since then there has been an enormous rise of products and companies that promote the natural (think organic), the local (terroir), old times, the heritage and so forth. Suddenly, The Old Factory doesn't seem as old nore natural as does many products and companies in their business. And As I was looking at their website the other day it appeared to me that, true enough, this company has a very long history. But what they have on the heritage-dimension they lack when it comes to reflexivity and their ability to bring their authenticity into the web 2.0 thinking which holds great potential to create the sense of locality and nearness; A new campaign invites web-users to participate in a competition with pictures from situations including the Old Factory products. A few users had already uploaded a few pictures of kids eating toast with jam. But the pictures seemed a little bit too nice. Too staged. Too happy. And sure enough - some of them carry the stamp "Getty Images" in the corner. The image of authenticity is staged lacking the roughness, the little mishaps, the scratches on the edges and the charm of a genuine "Kodak moment".

As Richard Peterson, author of "Country Music, Fabricating Authenticity" notes, ”You have to plow a lot of ground and look at the back side of a mule for a lot of years to sing a country song”, but later turns to discuss with more variety: ”You no longer have to watch the back of the mule, but you have to know the conventions of creating the music in order to be authentic. And the apparel will help”. The Old Factory has a long history of producing jam, but they forgot to use the real "apparel" when they tried to promote the image of authenticity in their web 2.0-venture: The participation of real people and their pictures.

  This has been a week of quite amazing project experiences at STAGIS. From from flying to Jutland with Anne to do identity studies among pupils and teachers at Femmøller Efterskole, to facilitating an exiting workshop on worst/best-case scenarios and visions for leaders across a sector for public transportation in DK with my colleagues Nikolaj and Louise. This exiting Employer Branding project that I've loved helping to start off, and where the pics are from, is just getting going on the road now after many months of prep-meetings; stay posted for more on this in 2008...

Codifying communicative challenges of recruitment and Employer Branding Even though these two projects are very, very different, they somehow share a code, that is also part of the code of what we do at STAGIS: Helping organizations communicate their authentic strengths from within, and develope their culture and visual identity in a way, that will strengthen the organization, express its culture in the authentic way, hereby aiming at recruiting the right employees for the organization - or pupils for the school, that will thrive in the institution - because they get an authentic image of what the organization or institution can offer.

In this sense, 'wrong' recruitment of pupils, which may lead to broken-off studies, because the institution is communicating a cultural image, values, goals or making promises it can't deliver, or because the communication isn't clear for its target groups, can be just as problematic for both the pupil and the institution, as if workplace organizations present themselves in an unclear or inauthentic way in a recruitment process, which may lead to an unfruitful process for as well employees as employers, challenging the work-life of both and making trouble for the organization keeping their employees or recruiting at all.

Authentic organizational identity as projecting images of practice
Through projecting an authentic image of the organization, the institution or business will make promises it can deliver, and with consultation it might also be able to reflect upon its own potentials for learning, developing and improving its recruitment to grow more futile grounds for attracting people that can support the values and future of the organization. So this is a two-way, relational and co-dependent thing, that our work aims at supporting. Really important when communicating on the job market - crucial when communicating or marketing to children and youngsters.

One of the identities Anne and Nikolaj will work on now, based on the identity research Anne and I did in Jutland this week, is the new identity and institutional image of Femmøller Efterskole.

Among other things I've been working on our interview material today; and I must say it was such a great experience talking to the appr. 15-18-year old pupils at Femmøller. After having specialized in communicating and marketing to kids and young people, and having worked with consumer identities among childen and young people, it was a great pleasure for me to do this research.

I'm impressed with the mind-sets, maturity and reflexivity of the pupils we talked to. If I were the principal there, I'd be thrilled hearing how happy and exited the pupils are with their scool and the culture lived at the institution. So, I look very much forward to see how Anne and Nikolaj will work with our culture and identity studies, turning them in to the authentic organizational image and identity of the institution.