How does a brand be authentic when the calibration is busted? How can a brand tell the truth when the very word is in flux? If the bedrock vocabulary we live on—authentic, transparent, values, truth—has been excavated and repoured by a hundred different hands, how do we set a foundation that will hold?
“What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
Strother Martin drops the line in Cool Hand Luke as The Captain, and it’s followed us around ever since—quoted at meetings and dinner tables and on the internet by people who’ve never seen the movie. That’s how you know a line hit bedrock: it names a thing we all feel. And in branding and marketing, we feel it most. Communication is the job. It’s the bloodstream. It’s how a product becomes a story, how a company becomes a character, how an idea becomes a movement. Clear communication turns friction into flow and strangers into customers. It keeps marriages intact and markets moving. The better you are at saying what you mean—cleanly, unmistakably—the more likely you are to get the outcome you want.
But there’s a problem. We have more ways to talk than at any point in human history—social media, billboards, email, podcasts, pre-rolls, newsletters, TV ads, newspapers, skywriters if you’re feeling theatrical—and still, somehow, we keep missing each other. We don’t lack channels. We lack clarity. And more to the point, we lack a shared understanding of the words we’re using.
Try this: search for “What’s the most important thing for brands right now?” You’ll get some version of the standard answer: build authentic, transparent, values-driven relationships. Move beyond transactions. Create meaningful connections. Purpose. Experience. All of it sounds right. Pleasing, even. But what, precisely, does authentic mean today? What does transparent actually require? What, hand on heart, are values-driven decisions when values themselves are contested, edited, and merchandised?
This isn’t a political screed. It’s a practical question. When people in positions of authority bend language until it squeals—when “truth” acquires an asterisk and “facts” get an “alternative”—the public square turns into a hall of mirrors. If truth is elastic, who measures authenticity? If facts can be forked, whose transparency counts? When meaning slides, standards slide with it.
Once upon a time, authentic carried a glimmer of unvarnished reality. It meant the thing and the message matched. Now the word shows up wearing six different outfits, doing six different jobs, and you’re left guessing which version you just bought. Transparent used to imply you could see through the glass. Today, it might mean a blog post with selective disclosures and a pastel infographic. And truth—the poor thing—has been handled worse than a thrift-store dictionary: dog-eared, highlighted, scribbled over, then reshelved under “my version.” At some point, we traded truth for “truthiness,” then for vibes, then for a vibe-adjacent caption.
So where does that leave brands—the professional communicators—in a culture that can’t agree on the dictionary? How does a brand be authentic when the calibration is busted? How can a brand tell the truth when the very word is in flux? If the bedrock vocabulary we live on—authentic, transparent, values, truth—has been excavated and repoured by a hundred different hands, how do we set a foundation that will hold?
Because here’s the uncomfortable diagnosis: it’s not that we’re failing to speak. We are speaking constantly. The failure is that meaning collapses under the weight of familiar words used carelessly, strategically, or so often they turn to dust. We’ve taken the language our industry grew up on and stretched it until the letters lost their shape. When a word gets abused beyond recognition, it stops signaling anything useful. It becomes set dressing.
And yet we keep reaching for the same words, because they’re convenient and safe and A/B tested. We keep saying authentic, transparent, purpose, values, truth, as if repeating them might conjure their original power. It doesn’t. It only proves the point: when everyone uses the same incantations, the spell breaks.
Which returns us to The Captain’s line. The failure to communicate isn’t a failure of volume or reach. It’s a failure of shared meaning. Until we reclaim the meaning of the words we lean on—or replace those words with language we can stand behind—our messages will continue to drift, pleasantly phrased and effectively empty.
Brand-Level Consequences of Language Drift
When language drifts, brands drift with it. You can have the most sophisticated media plan in the world, spend millions getting your message in front of the right eyeballs, and still, the words dissolve on contact. It’s like pouring water into sand. Nothing holds. The brand says “authentic,” the consumer hears “advertising.” The brand says “transparent,” the consumer hears “spin.” The brand says “values,” the consumer hears “marketing department.” What you intended and what they received are not the same thing.
This gap—the distance between what’s said and what’s understood—is where trust dies. It doesn’t go in a single dramatic collapse. It erodes. Slowly, grain by grain, until a once-solid foundation is nothing more than a mound of dust. People don’t stop listening because you stopped talking. They stop listening because they’ve stopped believing that your words mean what they’re supposed to mean.
And this is the real danger: communication without credibility is indistinguishable from noise. If every brand is authentic, none of them are. If every company is values-driven, the phrase becomes wallpaper—seen but unseen. That’s the paradox we’ve created. By repeating the words, we’ve hollowed them out. By overpromising, we’ve undercut them.
Consumers, meanwhile, are sharper than we sometimes give them credit for. They live in a constant stream of messages, and they’ve developed an instinct for spin the way you develop calluses from friction. They can tell when authenticity is manufactured, when transparency is selective, when “purpose” is an afterthought bolted onto a quarterly strategy deck. The average person may not have the vocabulary to deconstruct it, but they feel it. And what they feel is dissonance.
Once you lose alignment between language and lived experience, the brand fractures. No one is fooled by the billboard that says “We Care” if the product arrives broken, or if customer service is unreachable, or if the company is making headlines for treating employees like disposable parts. That’s the thing about words: they don’t live in isolation. They echo against actions. And when the echoes don’t line up, people don’t just doubt the message—they doubt the messenger.
What we’ve arrived at, then, is a strange irony. The industry that sells communication is itself suffering a crisis of communication. We’ve broken our own tools. The very words that were supposed to help us connect have become clichés that keep us apart. And as a result, many brands are like that character in a novel who keeps shouting louder and louder, certain that volume will solve misunderstanding, when in reality the listener just doesn’t speak the same language anymore.
Buzzwords and the Language Trap
The strangest part of this whole mess is that the words didn’t start out broken. They started out shining. Authentic once meant real, unforced, the opposite of staged. It was the handwritten note, the unpolished moment, the kind of message you couldn’t fake because the edges were still rough. Transparent was once a hard standard, a word that demanded visibility. You didn’t just say it, you showed the receipts. And truth—back when the word still had a spine—wasn’t negotiable. It either was or it wasn’t.
But then, slowly, those words became desirable in the way diamonds are desirable. Everyone wanted them. Everyone wanted to wear them, to display them, to claim them. And when everyone claims the same jewel, the jewel itself starts to feel suspicious. You look closer. You wonder: is this one cut from the real thing, or is it costume jewelry with a clever shine?
Brands didn’t mean to ruin these words. They just wanted to signal belonging, to reassure audiences they were on the right side of the cultural moment. But reassurance has a cost. Every time another brand plastered authentic across a campaign, the word’s value diluted. Every time a press release promised transparency without truly delivering it, the glass fogged a little more. And every time truth was twisted in public discourse, the very ground language stood on tilted underfoot.
This is the language trap. You use the word because it’s familiar, because it tested well, because every competitor is using it. And in using it, you help strip it of meaning. Until suddenly you look around and realize you’re building your brand on hollow planks. Words that once carried weight now weigh nothing.
And here’s the part that stings: once meaning is gone, it’s almost impossible to reclaim. You can’t just tell people, “No, no, when we say authentic, we really mean it.” You can’t just insist your truth is sturdier than anyone else’s truth. People don’t parse it that way. They hear the word and react to the residue of all the times they’ve heard it misused. Words carry history. Words drag baggage.
So now, even if your brand has the most genuine intentions, you’re stuck. You need a vocabulary, but the available vocabulary is cracked. And unless you find new language—or embody old language with such consistency that you rebuild its credibility—your message risks becoming another echo in the hall of noise.
The Cultural Mirror
It would be comforting to believe this problem lives only in marketing—that buzzwords are our private little curse. But the truth, slippery as it is, is bigger than that. Brands didn’t invent the distortion of language; they just borrowed the trick. The real stage for this act has always been culture itself.
Look around. Politics, media, entertainment—every arena is busy stretching words until they squeak. Leaders deploy phrases like “alternative facts” with a straight face. News outlets serve up “narratives” instead of reporting. Celebrities talk about their “authentic journeys” while filming them through ten layers of curation and filters. It’s not just that words are abused; it’s that they’re re-engineered on the fly to suit the speaker’s need. Meanings mutate in real time.
The result is a hall of mirrors. You say “truth,” I hear “agenda.” You say “values,” I hear “brand positioning.” You say “authentic,” I wait for the reveal of the sponsorship deal. We no longer share a stable dictionary. We share contested definitions, endlessly negotiated, endlessly spun. And once that shared dictionary dissolves, communication becomes a gamble. Every word carries a question mark. Every sentence requires an asterisk.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” If that’s true, what happens when language itself is unmoored? When the words we lean on to define reality become marketing slogans, political cudgels, or empty hashtags? The world itself feels unstable. Our conversations are not conversations but battles over the meaning of terms before we can even get to the substance.
Brands can’t pretend they’re immune to this. A company slogan doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it exists inside this cultural hall of mirrors. Consumers don’t just hear your words—they hear the echoes of every politician, influencer, and corporation who used those same words before you. The baggage arrives before the message does. And so a simple phrase like “we tell the truth” doesn’t land as reassurance—it lands as provocation. People tilt their heads, squint, and ask, “Which truth? Whose truth?”
In this way, branding is just a microcosm of the larger cultural breakdown. We’re all living in the same atmosphere, breathing the same thin air of language stripped of oxygen. And that’s why Strother Martin’s line hits so hard decades later. What we have here is a failure to communicate. Not because we aren’t speaking, but because the very tools of speech—the words themselves—are compromised before they even leave our mouths.
Of course, you might be thinking—this is all just a thought experiment, a bit of rhetorical smoke. Maybe even asking yourself, is this really that important? After all, language has always flowed and ebbed like the tide, shifting from society to society, generation to generation. We’re constantly adding words, dropping others, twisting meanings as culture evolves. Isn’t that just the natural life of language?
It’s a fair question. But the answer is yes—it is important. Vital, even. Not just because our common language shouldn’t require us all to carry a decoder ring to know what truth means on Monday compared to what it meant last Friday. Not just because words like authentic and transparent should mean something more than whatever is most convenient in the moment. But because we owe language clarity. We owe the words we lean on enough respect not to hollow them out for short-term gain. Without that, we’re not really communicating at all—we’re just playing a shell game with meaning.
The Trust Collapse
Trust doesn’t vanish in a dramatic headline. It trickles away in the quiet gap between what a brand says and what a customer experiences. That’s where the real collapse happens.
Think about it: if the culture at large has already made people skeptical of words like authentic or transparent, then every time a brand uses those words, they’re already on trial. The consumer leans in with a raised eyebrow, not an open heart. The presumption of sincerity is gone. And once you lose that presumption, you’re forced to over-explain, to over-sell, to insist on your credibility—which only makes you sound less credible. It’s a loop brands can’t win.
The irony is that most of the time, brands don’t lie outright. They just over-promise. They stretch language into a promise they can’t fully embody, and when reality falls short, people don’t think, “Ah, tough break.” They think, “Of course. Another word emptied.”
This is how words die. Not in a blaze, but in a slow starvation of trust. Every campaign that trumpets “We care” while customers wait on hold for an hour. Every glossy ad about sustainability slapped onto a product wrapped in three layers of plastic. Every corporate statement about “values” released the same week as a cost-cutting layoff. The dissonance doesn’t need to be shouted; it whispers loudly enough. And the whispers accumulate.
Once upon a time, a company could plaster a billboard with a bold word and let scale do the rest. If enough people saw it, they’d believe it. That era is gone. Today, people don’t just read the words. They cross-check. They scan reviews, watch videos, consult forums, and share screenshots. They triangulate the claim. And if the claim doesn’t hold, the word collapses. Not just for that brand, but for the word itself.
This is the collective erosion we’re watching. A failure to communicate that stems not from silence, but from saturation. Too many claims, too many slogans, too many borrowed words stretched across too many campaigns. Communication becomes static, and static breeds distrust. And once distrust becomes the default setting, the brand’s job is no longer to persuade—it’s to prove. To prove with actions what the words alone can no longer carry.
Which is a staggering thought for anyone in marketing: the very currency we trade in—words—is devaluing. Not because people stopped caring, but because we stopped guarding the meaning of the words we chose.
The Way Forward
If the words are cracked, if the trust has eroded, if the audience has tuned its ear to suspicion, what can brands possibly do? Stop talking? Go silent? That’s not an option. A brand that doesn’t communicate is a brand that disappears. So the challenge is not silence versus speech. The challenge is speech that still carries weight.
The way forward isn’t about inventing shinier buzzwords. It’s about refusing to lean on the hollow ones. If authentic has been drained, then stop announcing authenticity and start embodying it. Let the message show up in unpolished edges, in imperfect but honest gestures, in human voices instead of corporate templates. If transparent has been fogged, don’t issue a press release promising clarity—publish the numbers, disclose the process, let people see the gears turning. And if truth has been battered into fragments, then rebuild it one act at a time, through consistency, through follow-through, through a refusal to varnish the hard parts.
Because here’s the secret: clarity is radical now. In a world where language has been stretched, clarity lands like a hammer. The simplest sentence—“We made a mistake and here’s how we’ll fix it”—has more power than a 1,200-word letter layered with sincerity signals and curated vulnerability. The plain truth is disarming precisely because we see it so rarely.
This isn’t about perfection. It’s about alignment. Words mean something again when they line up with the lived experience of the people hearing them. A brand can’t just say “we care”; it has to show care in the frictionless return, the empathetic support call, the decision that costs something but honors a principle. A brand can’t just declare “values”; it has to bleed for them once in a while, to prove they’re not decorative but structural.
The paradox is that this path is harder, slower, and riskier than the shortcut of language. Actions are expensive; words are cheap. Which is exactly why words are now bankrupt. The brands that will survive this failure to communicate are the ones willing to spend in action what others spend in slogans.
And maybe that’s what communication was always meant to be: not the invention of clever phrases, but the act of making meaning stick. Language is only as strong as the reality behind it. And when the reality matches the words, the words live again.
Real-World Examples
And if all of this still feels abstract, just look around. The evidence piles up in headlines.
Remember Pepsi’s infamous protest ad? The one where Kendall Jenner handed a police officer a can of soda and, apparently, solved systemic injustice with carbonation? It wasn’t that the ad was badly shot. It wasn’t even that the music was off. It was that the wordless claim—the implicit we’re part of this movement—rang hollow against reality. Pepsi tried to borrow the vocabulary of authenticity, of solidarity, of values, but they had no right to it. The result wasn’t connection. It was backlash.
Or take airlines. Almost every carrier has at some point plastered we care across an ad campaign. And maybe, in the conference room, that phrase looked clean, resonant, human. But out in the real world? It landed on passengers sleeping on airport floors during mass cancellations. It landed on hold lines that stretched for hours. The word care cracked under the weight of lived experience. It didn’t matter how many commercials ran—the brand wasn’t communicating. It was contradicting itself in real time.
Fast fashion brands do a similar dance with sustainability. You’ve seen the campaigns: green logos, eco-friendly language, smiling models holding recycled cotton. But the reality—weekly production cycles, disposable quality, mountains of textile waste—betrays the word. The word sustainable has been stretched so far that it barely means anything. And the more it’s misused, the less trust consumers put in any brand that tries to use it honestly.
These aren’t rare stumbles. They’re symptoms of the broader illness: the overuse of language as decoration instead of definition. Words are pulled in because they’re shiny, because they test well, because the competitor used them last quarter. But every time a word is used without being lived, it dies a little. And once enough words die, you’re left with exactly what Strother Martin warned about: a failure to communicate.
The irony is that consumers don’t even need brands to be flawless. They need them to be consistent. They need the words to line up with the actions closely enough that the gap doesn’t feel like a canyon. People forgive mistakes; they don’t forgive hypocrisy. A company that says nothing and admits fault earns more trust than a company that says everything and delivers none of it.
Which means the choice isn’t between silence and spin. It’s between hollow words and words weighted by action. One path ends in noise. The other has a chance of meaning.
50 Eggs
Which brings us back to Cool Hand Luke. That single line—“What we have here is a failure to communicate”—still echoes because it names the ache underneath all of this. Not just in prisons or boardrooms or marketing meetings, but in the wider culture we live inside. We are surrounded by words, swimming in words, but starving for meaning.
Brands can’t solve politics. They can’t heal the fracture of truth in public discourse. But they can decide whether they contribute to the erosion or to the repair. They can decide whether to keep recycling the empty words, hoping a little polish will bring them back to life, or whether to risk something harder: clarity, plainness, action.
The brands that will matter are the ones that take language seriously enough not to abuse it. The ones that understand that words are not decoration, not confetti, but the fragile carriers of meaning—and that meaning only holds when it matches reality. In an age of alternative facts and curated authenticity, the simplest statement of truth is the most radical move a brand can make.
Because in the end, communication is not about volume, not about reach, not about how many channels or impressions or ad buys. Communication is about shared understanding. It’s about words that arrive intact and land as intended. And when that happens, when the word and the action align, when the truth is spoken without varnish, then we are no longer failing. Then we are communicating.
Strother Martin’s Captain said it as a reprimand. But maybe we can hear it as a warning. What we have here is a failure to communicate. Unless we choose otherwise.
