Finding Your True Self in the Digital Marketplace

Emmy Hartman was having the worst day of her life when she decided to film it. In a tearful TikTok video, she laid bare everything going wrong—her struggles, her failures, her raw emotional state. The video went viral. Today, she is a social media influencer with a thriving online business that trades on her vulnerabilities and apparent authenticity.

To many, this trajectory might seem baffling. After all, we have been conditioned to believe that authenticity and the marketplace were natural enemies. The moment you monetize your personal life, you come across as insincere. How can people be duped by TikTok tears cynically planned to sell product?

But a trio of marketing researchers says there is a lot more here than meets the eye. Emerging from a deep dive into the social media influencer world, the researchers make the convincing argument that the influencer phenomenon forces marketers to consider alternate ideas of authenticity in an online commercial setting.

The cultural narrative around authenticity has long been considered straightforward: We all have an innate “true self”, and our goal is to be faithful to it in the face of external pressures. Think of music documentaries in which an artist agonizes over “selling out” by signing with a major label, or craft brewers who lose their street cred the moment they expand beyond their hometown.

“The traditional view sees the marketplace as a threat to authenticity,” says Gabrielle Patry-Beaudoin of Université de Sherbrooke, who completed her PhD at Smith School of Business. “But this assumption doesn’t hold up when you look at what’s actually happening in contemporary digital spaces.”

Is the essential self outdated?

Patry-Beaudoin, with Jay Handelman and Tandy Thomas of Smith School of Business, interviewed 12 YouTube influencers and some of their followers and analyzed the influencers’ video content. When they coded and analyzed the themes that arose from the conversations, they picked up on a provocative trend. Rather than authenticity being something you are (possessing certain unchanging qualities), they discovered authenticity is increasingly seen as something you do—specifically, the ongoing work of improving and co-creating yourself through vulnerable sharing with social media followers. 

The researchers trace this shift back to Romantic-era concepts of “existential authenticity”—the idea that we do not have fixed, essential selves but rather create ourselves through our experiences and choices.

Sound familiar? This is essentially what millions of content creators do each day on platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram—sharing their struggles with mental health, relationships, career challenges and personal growth in real-time.

The key difference: Today’s digital confessions happen in spaces explicitly designed for monetization. And rather than seeing this as corruption, audiences increasingly view it as validation and a worthwhile reward for creating useful content.

In their article for the Journal of Consumer Research, Patry-Beaudoin, Handelman and Thomas identified three dynamics that define how authenticity works in these monetized digital spaces:

First, the creation of existential communities. Influencers and their audiences actively seek out spaces where vulnerability is not just accepted but celebrated. When creators share their struggles with anxiety, their audience doesn’t just consume the content—they share their own experiences and create what the researchers call "shared acts of resolute vulnerability."

Second, vulnerability becomes legitimate work. Both creators and audiences explicitly frame emotional labour and personal sharing as work worthy of compensation, as something enabling rather than exploitative. Monetization allows creators to continue their heartfelt sharing without having to hide behind traditional career facades.

Third, a new power structure emerges. Traditional influencer relationships assume the creator has power over a passive audience. But the researchers noted something different: Creators and audiences collaboratively establish norms around authentic behaviour, adjusting their interactions based on mutual feedback.

This last finding may be the most significant. Previous research on authenticity focused heavily on “parasocial relationships”—one-sided connections in which audiences feel intimacy with creators who are oblivious to them. This research reveals something more complex: “synoptic relationships” in which both sides acknowledge the performative nature of the interaction while still finding genuine value in it. 

Both the influencers and their followers acknowledge that they do not, and cannot, know each other in a meaningful way, the researchers say. Yet this does not diminish the authenticity of the exchange. 

When a YouTuber says, “Hey guys, I’ve been struggling with imposter syndrome lately and I wanted to share what's been helping me,” their audience understands this is simultaneously genuine personal sharing and content creation and potentially profitable for the influencer. The transparency of these multiple layers does not undermine authenticity—it creates it. 

Brand lessons on authenticity

For marketing strategists, brand authenticity is like a Holy Grail. It is widely acknowledged that brands that are able to project authenticity are rewarded with greater trust and stronger customer relationships. But it is not easy to achieve, which is why brands around the world spend more than $32 billion a year on influencer-driven initiatives, more often than not hiding these relationships from their customers. 

Perhaps the concern about being seen as close to social media influencers is misplaced, says Patry-Beaudoin. She says one implication of this study is that marketers should feel free to use their sponsorships to demonstrate support for the influencer’s ongoing journey of self-discovery.

The alternative view of authenticity laid out by Patry-Beaudoin, Handelman and Thomas comes at an opportune time. In an era of AI-generated content, deep fakes and algorithmic curation, traditional markers of “realness” are increasingly meaningless.

There is, however, something reassuring about the researchers’ formulation of authenticity as a messy exercise in self-creation rather than adherence to fixed categories of identity. It opens space for growth, change and genuine connection.

In a world where the old certainties about identity, career and success are crumbling, maybe that is exactly the kind of authenticity we need: not the authenticity of being, but the authenticity of becoming.