February 27, 2025, by lizels

What happens before authenticity? – Dr Brendan Canavan

Dr Brendan Canavan is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Nottingham University Business School and Theme lead for authenticity and experience design for the Sustainable Travel and Tourism Advanced Research Centre (STTAR Centre). In this blog, Brendan discusses the question ‘What happens before authenticity?’ examining how he and Professor Jillian Rickly, Head of the Marketing, Tourism and Analytics Department at Nottingham University Business School, tackled this question in their new paper The emergence of authenticity: Phases of tourist experience.

A quick question

A quick question asked leaning in through Jillian’s office door one morning in Business School North. Pondering out loud something that had been niggling me. Authenticity is critical in tourism. The cues people use to evaluate whether experiences are as claimed. The personal insights that can be inspired by experiences. We don’t talk much about before authenticity.

I was frequently seeing cute baby social media reels at this time, the algorithms no doubt clocking that I’m nearing 40 and consumer opportunities are being lost. This prompted my question. Babies seem very authentic. Yet they’re not capable of higher cognitive processes and self-consciousness and so cannot be authentic in the classic philosophical sense.

I’d actually forgotten that I’d asked, when, months later, Jillian came back to me and shared that she had come up with what she called a stage of ‘pre-authenticity’. Developing the concept while on her morning dog walks, recording voice notes of her musings.

The concept of pre-authenticity

Pre-authenticity can be explained as an essential unawareness of authenticity, and all its associated issues of truth claims and contradictions. We perhaps all have this authenticity-unawareness to begin with. A sort of naïve innocence that we might associate with babies first exploring their surroundings.

This state ends when we become aware of and start to question our surroundings, and ourselves within those surroundings. Once we become aware of authenticity, both in how we see things as real and in how we express our true selves, we can choose to embrace or reject it, but we can never unsee it.

Maybe pre-authenticity is why we find baby videos heart-warming. They remind us of a time before we became aware of complex considerations of authenticity in our lives, before we had to try to live truthfully.

Pre-authenticity is a great concept, and it led to us developing a broader idea of authenticity as a process of emergence. This sees authenticity occur in stages; from pre-, to proto-, when niggling awareness begins to occur, then in-situ, where encounters are overt, and lastly post-authenticity, as thoughts and feelings are reflected upon and processed.

The emergence of authenticity: Phases of tourist experience

We wrote a conceptual paper around this framework within the tourist experience. We submitted, had it rejected, re-wrote and re-submitted. After three rounds of revisions, we took a break from the paper. Then, adopting a critical realism perspective, that neatly tied up both the objective and subjective elements of the argument, we were published. You can read our article The emergence of authenticity: Phases of tourist experience.

Seeing the polished, publisher approved version might suggest two authors who knew from the start what they were doing and where they were going. But beneath the finished piece, is the process of curiosity, inspiring and listening, writing, and reflecting. It is mutual passion for a subject. Serendipitous conversation in a corridor. A niggling sense of something whilst scrolling social media. Taking walks with your thoughts. Returning to share these and the frustration they yield. While also knowing the whole time you are onto something interesting, if you can just find the way.

In doing these with a fellow colleague or student you might find yourself asking and answering a question and get to share it with others forever.

Read Brendan and Jillian’s full paper here: The emergence of authenticity: Phases of the tourist experience.

Find out more about Nottingham University Business School’s Sustainable Travel and Tourism Advanced Research Centre and Department of Marketing, Tourism and Analytics.

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