Creating and interpreting brand authenticity: The case of a young brand
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Consumers increasingly seek authenticity in the brands they consume. Although studied extensively, brand authenticity appears to be restricted to older, more timeless brands. This article challenges previous research findings by examining whether or not young brands can be perceived as authentic and, if so, how? Adopting a holistic view, the author investigates interpretation—by consumers—and construction—by the brand—of an authentic image in the case of a young brand. The twofold objective of this research involves identifying dimensions of consumer‐perceived brand authenticity in the early stages of the development of an authentic brand and then understanding the practices employed by the brand to support the observed dimensions of authenticity. Supplemented by seven individual interviews, a netnography of the online community of a young brand quickly recognized for authenticity reveals three central dimensions of authenticity, namely, transparency, virtuousness, and proximity. An analysis of brand publications within the community further expose the interplay of indexical (i.e., evidence‐based authenticity signals) and iconic cues (i.e., impression‐based authenticity signals) in support of the dimensions. Findings substantiate the prevalence of brand transparency over both virtuousness and proximity in the early stages of the development of an authentic brand. In addition, although indexical cues dominate in conveying transparency, iconic cues prove central to virtuousness, and both signal proximity. The article, the first to broach the construction of authenticity for a young brand, enhances the corpus of knowledge on authenticity through a re‐examination of the significance and construction of the concept.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it