Everything Can Be Faked Now Except a Reputation

The signals that stopped working

Every proxy for legitimacy that buyers relied on has become cheap. A professional site used to indicate a funded company. A consistent content programme used to indicate an organisation with real capability behind it. Reviews used to indicate customers. None of these are reliable signals now, and buyers know it — which is why the evaluation behaviour I'm observing has shifted so heavily toward asking people they already trust.

What buyers are substituting

Peer verification, almost entirely. A named customer they can actually contact. A recommendation from someone in their network. A practitioner community where your name comes up unprompted. An individual with a traceable, checkable track record. These are expensive and slow to build, and that's precisely what makes them credible — the cost is the signal.

• Customers who will take a reference call, not just appear as a logo
• Named individuals with checkable histories rather than anonymous company voices
• Unprompted mentions in communities you don't control
• Specific, verifiable claims rather than impressive but unfalsifiable ones

What this means for how you market

Put real people in front of the market, with names and histories attached. Make your customers genuinely willing to advocate, which is a product and success problem more than a marketing one. Be specific enough in your claims that they could be checked, because checkability is now a differentiator in itself. And accept that this is slow — you cannot accelerate reputation, which is the entire reason it still works.

The uncomfortable corollary

This asymmetrically favours companies who have been around long enough to have a reputation, which is genuinely hard on new entrants. The route through it hasn't changed, it's just narrower: pick a smaller niche, serve a handful of customers exceptionally well, and let them speak for you. It's slower than buying attention and it's the only version that compounds.