Last week there was an interview on Radio Tundra with the CEO of Canada Goose. They make coats for killingly cold weather: parkas and anoraks really but he insisted on calling them coats. If Canada Goose had been around in 1912, Captain Scott and the boys would probably have made it home. Uniquely, these coats are made right here in Canuckistan. Unlike all their competition, Canada Goose has eschewed offloading production to third world sweatshops. And so they are also very costly coats.

The interviewer repeatedly lobbed openings for yer man to extol the quality of his coats: the sheer frost fighting, ice repelling, Arctic wind-cheating efficacy of these miracles of human insulation; how polar bears would kill for these coats, how you’ll never need to buy another winter coat (unless of course you’ve had a run-in with a polar bear), or more controversially perhaps, “Well really, what does your average 9 year-old Chinese kid know about thermal insulation?” But instead he blithered incessantly about ‘authenticity’.

”Why should people buy these expensive coats?” “Well Brian, we think people are really looking for authenticity…”. “But in these days of austerity aren’t you taking a big risk?” “Well Brian we think authenticity is really what people want to pay for these days.” “But if they can save money do you think people…?” “It’s all about the authenticity Brian, these are Authentic Made In Canada Coats.”

And I know that by now astute reader, you are thinking exactly what I was thinking as I listened to this load of cobblers awls: he’s had a fucking branding consultant in; the poor fucker’s shelled out a great chunk of the kids’ inheritance on a branding consultant. And the branding consultant after six months of brand auditing and focus grouping and power pointing and general fucking around, has told him that his fucking brand narrative is: ‘AUTHENTICITY’.

I expect the branding consultant also told him that heretofore, he should refer to his product as ‘coats’, in order to distinguish them from your common or garden Szechewan or Hunan parkas and anoraks.

No doubt Canada Goose is also having some ‘authentic’ ‘conversations’ with a view to ‘engaging’ ‘authenticity seekers’ and perhaps encouraging them to tell their ‘authentic’ stories or some such twaddle. And somehow, some day, perhaps one of them may buy a Canada Goose ‘coat’. Or not.