A Wren Says

I am working through the qualities that make a luxury product “luxury.” The first is authenticity. But what does that even mean? When thinking about luxury products, that words gets used when thinking about counterfeits. It is a similar concept here. People don’t want your brand to be fake, in a sense. There are multiple ways you can go about measuring brand authenticity, but I will give you just two here from the research done.

 Based on the work Bruhn, Schoenmüller, Schäfer, & Heinrich (2012), you can think of brand authenticity in terms of four dimensions:

1. Consistency: What is the history of the brand? How much has the brand changed over time? How similar is it to the way it was from when it first started?
2. Originality: Does the brand stand out from others? Does it seem to tell a unique story? What makes it different from the other brands?
3. Reliability: Does it keep its promises? Do you get what you think you’re going to get from the brand?
4. Naturalness: Does the brand seem “fake”?

Or you can think of it along these three categories provided by Napoli, Dickinson, Beverland, and Farrelly (2014):

1. Quality commitment: Perceptions of the materials, manufacturing process, and quality standards used by the brand
2. Sincerity: How well the brand has stayed true to its values and principles from its founding
3. Heritage: The brand’s connection to history, culture, and region and the overall story of the brand itself

Brand authenticity is more about whether or not a brand appears to have remained true to itself. When people think about the authenticity of a brand, they are thinking about history and whether or not the brand is evolving in a clear direction or in a move that is just following trends or motivated by greed. They want the brand to be about the art and something bigger than itself, even though we know at our core that this is all really just about money. This is why the words artisanal, handcrafted, and original are so powerful. It connects a brand to people and the people who have been involved with it from the start.

Here are my sources:

Bruhn, M. Schoenmüller, V., Schäfer, D., & Heinrich, D. (2012). Brand authenticity: Towards a deeper understanding of its conceptualization and measurement”. in Advances in Consumer Research Volume 40, eds. Zeynep Gürhan-Canli, Cele Otnes, and Rui (Juliet) Zhu, pp 567-576. http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/1013106/volumes/v40/NA-40

Napoli, J., Dickinson, S. J., Beverland, M. B., & Farrelly, F. (2014). Measuring consumer-based brand authenticity. Journal of business research, 67(6), 1090-1098.