What It Takes to Be Loved? An Empirical Examination of Human Brand Authenticity: An Abstract

Empowered by traditional and social media, human brands enjoy a prominent position in contemporary societies and benefit from the establishment of strong consumer-brand relationships. However, as current times are marked with uncertainty and fakeness, authenticity has become a critical element for the development of these relationships, especially for human brands. We propose and test a model that depicts the relationship between human brand authenticity, understood as “being true to one-self”, and brand love. A stratified random sample of 748 non-student respondents was obtained from a web-based survey distributed through social media. OLS regression analysis was employed to test the proposed model. Results show that human brand authenticity has a positive and significant effect on brand love. Moreover, differences by human brand contexts are analyzed, offering some insights into how celebrity authenticity is processed across human brand types. Our study revealed that the effect of authenticity is stronger for politicians, CEOs, bloggers, religious leaders and television hosts, for whom showing consistency in behaviors and being true to themselves is critical for the attainment of brand love. In addition, a negative moderation by consumer’s age was identified, signaling to the decreasing importance of authenticity as a driver of brand love as consumers mature. No moderations were found by consumer’s gender. We conclude with important managerial implications suggesting that investments in fostering human brand authenticity will pay off through the establishment of long-lasting, loving and loyal relationships, which are crucial for building brand equity, especially in the contexts where human brand authenticity yielded higher effects on brand love. Instead of aiming for perfection, human brands and their managers must carefully design brand positioning strategies anchored in authenticity. Maintaining similar behaviors over time allows for the stability, continuity and consistency necessary for attaining perceptions of authenticity. In conclusion, human brands may trade in their authenticity for being liked, but to be loved, they must be authentic.