A pair of George Mason University marketing professors have unpacked the surprisingly intense and complicated emotional consequences of brand inauthenticity.
We all know what it’s like to discover—either gradually or all at once—someone else’s insincerity. Jessica Hoppner and Russell Abratt, marketing professors at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at George Mason University, have found that an encounter with an inauthentic brand produces much the same effect.
“Authenticity is defined within the context of the brand-consumer relationship,” Hoppner says. In other words, it’s in the eye of the beholder—or in this case, the consumer. Inauthenticity occurs when a brand behaves in a way that appears to go against its perceived core values, or the consumer’s baseline expectations for that particular brand.
“This kind of inauthenticity causes problems for brand managers because for each person it’s a little bit different, and that makes it really hard to navigate,” Hoppner says.
In their recently published paper in the Journal of Product & Brand Management, Hoppner and Abratt trace the emotional cause-and-effect of brand inauthenticity, offering rare insight into this slippery phenomenon.
The paper was co-authored by Ryan White of Winona State University.
The researchers recruited 218 survey participants using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Respondents were asked to write about an experience of brand inauthenticity and answer a series of questions about that experience and steps they took afterward. The results were analyzed in light of concepts drawn from psychological research, such as appraisal theory and balance theory.
Surprisingly, participants named a wide range of brands (156 in all), only 25.2 percent of which appeared on Interbrand’s Top 100 Best Global Brands List. “It covered large brands, small brands, all different sectors,” says Hoppner. “It’s not constrained to consumer products or the brands that we would normally think about.”
The survey responses showed that customers experienced brand inauthenticity as a betrayal of sorts, with emotional implications comparable to those of human-to-human betrayal.
Brand inauthenticity triggered a complex mix of emotional responses in consumers. Anger, anxiety, and disappointment were the principal motifs across the sample, but individual reactions could include one, two, or even all three. The strength of reactive emotions varied according to the perceived severity of the betrayal.
Further, the researchers found that the three main emotional responses led to different behaviors in consumers.
Abratt and Hoppner describe anger as a “hot emotion,” causing consumers to lash out at brands deemed inauthentic, through retaliation, complaints, and withdrawal of loyalty.
Anxiety inspired a less accusatory and more questioning response, as consumers groped for the deeper truth about this apparently two-faced brand. “Anxiety is very ambiguous,” Hoppner says. “When we’re anxious, it’s often because we don’t really know what happened, why it happened, who’s to blame, etc.” Consumers made anxious by brand inauthenticity actually increased their loyalty to the brand, and sought out more information to resolve the ambiguity.
Finally, disappointment led consumers to lapse into a self-protective passivity. Their central concern became not closure or redress, but rather avoiding further disappointment by turning their back on the offending brand.
Abratt and Hoppner advise brand managers to think twice before launching a rote response in hopes of winning back consumers alienated by perceived inauthenticity. Anger and anxiety show up very differently, and disappointment may not show up at all in any conventionally measurable way. When addressing inauthenticity after the fact, a brand’s best bet may be to ask questions and listen closely before attempting to fix the problem.
Of course, the ideal approach would be to avoid being seen as inauthentic in the first place. That would mean understanding the actual relationships consumers have with the brand, which may differ from how managers view the brand’s value proposition. It may also entail intentional, proactive reshaping of those relationships.
“I think the real issue for firms is to understand who they are,” Abratt says. “In other words, brands have to talk about their identity. And once they have figured that one out, they have to have training amongst their employees and say, ‘this is what we stand for. This is what we do.’ Communicate that to your markets and your community, and make sure that you allow the community and customers to talk back with you.”
“I think the real issue for firms is to understand who they are,” Abratt says. “In other words, brands have to talk about their identity. And once they have figured that one out, they have to have training amongst their employees and say, ‘this is what we stand for. This is what we do.’ Communicate that to your markets and your community, and make sure that you allow the community and customers to talk back with you.”
— Russell Abratt, marketing professor at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at George Mason University