Creating and interpreting brand authenticity: The case of a young brand
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".