Why do brands struggle to build authentic connection?

For years marketers have talked about authenticity, community, and connection. These words appear everywhere in brand strategy decks and campaign briefs. They sound human, they promise closeness – and yet, so many brands still feel distant from the people they are trying to reach.  

It is a strange paradox of modern marketing that we talk endlessly about connection while often creating communications that feel anything but connected.

Why do some brands feel naturally human, while others are trying very hard to appear human?  

How the social media algorithm has shifted from reach to relevance

The channels in which we communicate have shifted. When brands focused on reaching the masses, it was about capturing as many eyeballs as possible. Big campaigns, big money, big reach. Brands paid to be where audiences gathered, largely in shared, synchronous moments.

For many years, social media mirrored this model – more followers equalled more social currency. Then came the updates. TikTok entered the chat and changed expectations with a simple ‘For You’ page. Suddenly, content relevance was prioritised over follower count.  

Other social platforms followed. The rise of smaller, more niche creators boomed, and with it a stronger sense of intimacy. Content now finds you through your interests, creating a built-in common connection before you even engage.

What is social commerce, and how is it changing consumer behaviour?

For much of the past two decades, online shopping has been designed around efficiency. People search for products, compare options, read reviews and then click ‘buy’ – the interaction was transactional and often solitary. Nothing like the experience of social media.  

Then, creators focusing on relevant content for small, engaged audiences started to monetise their influence as part of the growing creator economy.  

Social commerce is the buying and selling of products directly within social media environments. In social commerce, people start to matter more than products. Discovery happens through individuals, not just reach, and purchasing becomes part of a broader social experience.

Why founder-led brands have a natural advance in social commerce

Founder-led brands begin with a visible human centre – this is why the beauty category has become such fertile ground for founder-led The intimacy gap: why founder-led brands are winning in social commerce brands. #Beautytok birthed a generation of creators that became unintentional marketers and paved the way for social commerce.

Many fast-growing companies now are built around personalities first and products second. The audience follows the founder, the community forms around them, and the product becomes part of that ongoing relationship. For younger audiences especially, the order of influence often runs community first, creator second, and product third. 

When audiences follow a founder, they are not mindlessly consuming marketing messages but observing a person over time. They watch their personality, humour, opinions and contradictions become part of the brand story. And naturally, the brand becomes intertwined with the individual behind it.

The person is just as important as the product, which is where social commerce has reshaped people’s expectations of what it means to be marketed to.  

How social commerce is making shopping more personal

When Kim Kardashian livestreams new Skims releases, the format looks less like a product launch and more like a conversation. People watch her explain the products, respond to comments, and share the thinking behind them in real time.  

The experience sits somewhere between entertainment, community, and retail. This is not your mum’s live shopping network – this is personal. Commerce is becoming something it once was before modern retail systems formalised everything – a social exchange between people.

Psychologists describe this dynamic as a parasocial relationship.  

What are parasocial relationships and how do they influence consumers?

A parasocial relationship is a one-sided relationship that still feels emotionally meaningful, like when people feel as if they know someone they regularly see online, even though that connection only runs one way.  

The term sounds academic, but the experience is deeply human – familiarity, curiosity, attachment.

When a founder introduces a new product, audiences interpret it through the personality they have come to recognise. When something goes wrong, communities often respond with more patience because the brand feels personal rather than faceless and the relationship already built. Over time the product stops being the whole story and becomes part of an unfolding narrative about the person behind it.  

The intimacy gap: why large brands struggle to build closeness

This is where the intimacy gap begins to emerge.

Large organisations are built for scale, governance and consistency – these qualities are essential for managing risk and maintaining brand standards, but they rarely produce intimacy.

Instead, many brands try to simulate closeness through influencer partnerships, creator collaborations, or carefully crafted storytelling. Large organisations are increasingly investing in creator programs to bridge that gap. Brands like L'Oréal work with large networks of content creators to bring personalities closer to the brand. These programs can and do expand reach and relevance, but they rarely replicate the intimacy that comes from a founder who is personally embedded in the brand narrative.

We’ll see more of this, with AI companies like Devotion scaling the labour of building community for large brands. This type of marketing sits firmly in building awareness, but it’s not a shortcut for replacing brand DNA – something founder led brands have in strides. That can’t be bypassed.

How trust is built in social commerce

From a traditional brand management perspective, this can feel uncomfortable, vulnerable even. It introduces a degree of unpredictability that many organisations have historically tried to avoid.  

But behaviourally it serves such an important function – reducing distance, growing trust through transparency.

Familiarity lowers cognitive effort, so when a brand appears repeatedly in a social environment through a person people recognise, evaluating it requires less mental work. Consumer trust builds through repeated exposure rather than a single persuasive message.

How can big brands feel more human?

Don’t force intimacy

All that said, the instinct of any marketer at a large company would be to bring your brand closer to your audience, to let them see the people behind the curtain. But those people aren’t the reason they are loyal to your brand.  

The roasting of McDonald’s CEO shone a spotlight on how distant corporations are to the people that buy their product. In trying to give a human face to the brand, they revealed a more corporate interior. The performance of relatability is not the same as actual proximity – a key tension in brand authenticity today

Audiences today are highly literate in marketing – they understand the mechanics of promotion, and they are quick to recognise when something feels manufactured.  

What audiences respond to is not performance, but proximity – the sense that they are seeing a person rather than a marketing construct. The lesson for organisations is not that every brand needs a charismatic founder or a livestream strategy. It is not to force someone from the marketing team to start doing live reels on Instagram.

The point is that commerce is becoming more human again.

Leave the side door open

Audiences don’t want to see what brands want them to see. They want to feel like they are being invited into a part of the brand that hasn’t been scripted.  

The Staples Baddie (a.k.a @blivxx) – check out her TikTok – it has intimate, unscripted chats with you in the aisles of a US office supply store. Not prompted, not controlled by corporate. You can imagine the restraint required from the marketing team not to intervene. Let outsiders in to build credibility where founder-led companies spark connection through the person, larger brands can invite outsiders in to re-ignite interest.  

Let outsiders in

The collaboration between Skims and Nike was launched with a single image of Kim Kardashian’s Nike employee badge. It signalled that she was on the inside, bringing her followers with her.

Similarly, Slazenger has enlisted TikTok designer Alexei Hamblin to reinvent their brand. His content became his portfolio, and the brand invited him in.

In a digital world where almost everyone online is promoting something, credibility becomes harder to outsource. When audiences sense that intimacy is being staged rather than lived (see McDonald’s CEO trying a new burger...) the reaction can be immediate. Credibility comes less from polished messaging, and more from letting audiences into the messy, chaotic reality of product development, and the people behind these processes.

The future of social commerce and creator-led brands ‍

Community dynamics increase the effect. Seeing others engage with a founder or brand reinforces legitimacy and social acceptance. Over time, behaviour begins to resemble participation rather than consumption.  

People are now buying into relationships, stories, and communities they feel connected to.

That shift is becoming more than a creative nuance – it is shaping how trust forms and how purchase decisions are made.  

In markets like China and Korea, livestream shopping has already transformed e-commerce into something far more interactive. Western markets are starting to move in a similar direction, with creator storefronts, social platform integrations, and the expected arrival of TikTok Shop in Australia.

Our closing thoughts: why human brands win

As purchasing environments become increasingly social, people encounter brands inside spaces shaped by personalities, relationships, and communities rather than traditional advertising channels.

In that environment, the most valuable asset brand can achieve is perceived closeness – a key driver of brand trust and loyalty. Brands that understand how to reduce the distance between themselves and their audiences will operate very differently from those that remain purely transactional.

And perhaps the deeper insight is this: when brands behave like people, people respond to them like people. And in a world where attention and trust are increasingly scarce, the brands that feel human will almost always have the advantage.

Understanding the intimacy gap is not just a creative challenge, but a behavioural and cultural one. At the Research Agency, we use behavioural science and cultural insight to help brands uncover how connection is formed – and how to build it in ways that feel real to people.  

If you’re thinking about how your brand shows up in increasingly social, human environments, we’d love to chat.