Disentangling the Meanings of Brand Authenticity: An Abstract

Consumer demand for authenticity is a foundation of modern-day marketing (Brown et al. 2003). Marketers increasingly tout their brand’s authenticity to tap this underlying consumer need: Manatee County, Florida, claims it is “Real. Authentic. Florida.” (Salmon 2012), and Sargento cheese asks consumers to “Taste the Real Difference.” The importance of brand authenticity is also reflected within the marketing literature, as a significant amount of research has been dedicated to the topic (e.g., Beverland and Luxton 2005; Leigh et al. 2006; Morhart et al. 2015; Napoli et al. 2014; Spiggle et al. 2012).

Nonetheless, in the marketing literature the meanings of authenticity and brand authenticity are still highly debated. Researchers agree that authenticity and brand authenticity contain various meanings, but little consensus exists concerning the number of meanings and what those meanings entail (Beverland and Farrelly 2010).

In an attempt to address this lack of clarity in the literature, this conceptual research has two main objectives. First, this research introduces the Entity–Referent Correspondence Framework of Authenticity. The ERC Framework offers an overarching definition of authenticity. The ERC Framework proposes that, in the most general sense, authenticity is the degree to which an entity in one’s environment (e.g., object, person, performance) is true to or matches up with something else. We label this “something else” a referent—the point of reference to which the entity is compared. Thus, we assert that authenticity is the extent to which an entity corresponds to a referent. Further, the ERC Framework presents three general types of authenticity: true-to-ideal, true-to-fact, and true-to-self. True-to-ideal authenticity is defined as the extent to which an entity’s attributes correspond with a socially determined standard or exemplar. True-to-fact authenticity is defined as the extent to which information stated or implied about an entity corresponds with the actual state of affairs. True-to-self authenticity is defined as the extent to which an entity’s behavior corresponds with its intrinsic motivations as opposed to its extrinsic motivations. While the three types are similar in that they all involve entity–referent correspondence, they are distinguished by their unique referents: an ideal, a fact, and another’s self.

Second, this research classifies 49 prior definitions of authenticity and brand authenticity and/or its types or dimensions (based on a systematic review) into one of our three authenticity types. Overall, all but two concepts fit within the proposed typology, offering strong evidence of the typology’s conceptual robustness. The ERC Framework of Authenticity contributes to the brand authenticity literature within marketing by organizing previous definitions into one of the three types. This paper also illustrates that these three different authenticity types may manifest at different levels of abstraction.