Is authenticity rewarded or inauthenticity penalized? Reconsidering the value of brand authenticity

Despite the many positive outcomes of brand authenticity identified in the literature, it remains unclear whether consumers indeed reward authentic brands or instead punish inauthentic brands. To address this gap, we complemented experimental manipulations of brand (in)authenticity with a baseline condition and examined their effects on various consumer responses (e.g., purchase intention, willingness to a pay price premium, and word-of-mouth intentions). Results of three experiments (N = 1617) including one preregistered experiment and one with a nationally representative sample reveal that authentic brands induce more positive responses than inauthentic brands, but do not differ from a neutral baseline. These findings put the value of brand authenticity into a new perspective and suggest that authenticity is not necessarily rewarded but might merely be the standard against which brands are evaluated.