Your writing is inspiring and persuasive as always. However, I wonder if the distinction between brand and organizational authenticity isn’t a little less clear-cut than what I understand from this. In my own research, I find that it is not that uncommon for people to judge brands by the actions of the companies behind them. Brand messages around, say, a passion for sports cars are juxtaposed against activities of the brand owner that are, e.g., interpreted as overly concerned with profit-maximization. In other words, consumers do question the alignment between identity, image, and actions.

Your view seems to be that this might happen in “specific situations”. The question is how specific these situations really are. Quite a few brands rely on the history, heritage—and current practices—of the producing company. What’s more, it seems to me that the boundaries between organizations and their brands are increasingly blurry.

As many organizations have consolidated their investments in search of efficiencies, the corporate brand has become somewhat of the default focus of brand-building efforts. This makes it difficult to separate corporations from brands. In addition, critical consumers, media, and anti-brand activists are more and more interested in exposing the link between successful brands and the people and processes responsible for them. Or, as Douglas Holt (2002, p. 86) puts it: “Sovereign consumers are no longer willing to watch whatever companies choose to present onstage. Rather, they now feel that they have been granted the authority to walk backstage to see the what the wizard is doing behind the scrim and to make sure that his character is consistent with what is presented onstage.”

In this perspective, the link between brands and corporations is even a centerpiece of consumer perceptions of brand authenticity: “Postmodern consumer culture has adopted a particular notion of authenticity that has proved particularly challenging to marketers. To be authentic, brands must be disinterested; they must be perceived as invented and disseminated by parties without an instrumental economic agenda, by people who are intrinsically motivated by their inherent value. (Holt 2002, p. 83)

So, I’m not saying that organizational and brand authenticity is the same thing, but don’t all the contemporary calls for more “transparency” and “accountability” suggest that quite a few people believe that corporate attributes do matter in a brand context? What do you think?

Reference:

Holt, Douglas B. (2002), “Why do brands cause trouble? A dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding,” Journal of Consumer Research, 29(1), 70-90.