AdAge reports that Taco Bell owner Yum! Brands plans to boost Spanish-languge marketing to increase the share of Latino customers.

It won’t help. Synovate’s Everett Hernandez observes, "It’s not really Mexican food or food that unacculturated Hispanics know from their home country."

"If they want to broaden their Hispanic market … their issue is authenticity," says Carl Kravetz of Cruz/Kravetz: Ideas "and they have a lot of years of not being perceived as authentic to break through."

They have a lot of years of not being perceived as authentic . . . This is as clear a statement of the marketing dilemma as I can imagine. Marketing is so disconnected from product design and delivery that, really, all marketers can do is make stuff up. If they’re lucky, they hit on something clever enough to move the needle a bit, in which case they get a chance to try it again. But the average tenure of American Chief Marketing Officers is 23 months, so . . . good luck with that, I guess . . .

"Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from from the evil one," Jesus said. Some years later James picked up the echo with a twist at the end: "or you will be condemned" (Matthew 5:37; James 5:12). Condemned describes nicely what is happening to unauthentic brands because there’s nowhere to hide in the new economy. I mean look at what’s right in front of you: You don’t read AdAge and you don’t own stock in Taco Bell; yet here you are witnessing a public spanking of the brand. As Seth Godin notes in the introduction to Small is the New Big, "Multiple channels of information mean that it’s almost impossible to live a lie. Authentic stories spread and last" (Small is the New Big, 2006, Portfolio, p ix).

What authentic story can Taco Bell tell? "If they say they deliver good Mexican food to [Hispanics]," Carl Kravetz says, "they won’t be believed. If they say they have good, filling, cheap American food, they may have a chance."

There’s at least one other possibility for the 44 year-old brand: They could go back to the kitchen and prepare better food for everyone (and wouldn’t that be remarkable).

Here’s a set of questions that set my teeth on edge just a little:

• Does my brand’s "Yes" mean "Yes?"
• Does mine?
• Does my brand tell an authentic story or do my marketers have make up stuff?
• Do I have what it takes to go back to the kitchen and deliver on my brand’s promise?