The Impact of Brand Authenticity on Brand Trust and Cause-related Marketing: A Consumer Perspective

Abstract

The study investigates the impact of brand authenticity on brand trust, and causerelated marketing (CRM) and examines the relationship between these three constructs. Although the literature identified several properties of authenticity, the relative importance of each construct and attribute in terms of influencing the brand trust of consumers for a brand with CRM was yet to be determined. There was a gap in understanding how brand authenticity influences brand trust and CRM from consumers’ perspective, a research problem that this study addressed. This study was conducted from a consumer’s perspective, within the fast-food industry using Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) CRM as the experiment intervention. The fast-food industry was chosen as the research context because it is very sensitive to CRM on the fact that fast-food is perceived to prioritise profit at the expense of society. A total of 151 South African consumers participated in the experiment. The research approach adopted for this study was Quantitative using a field experiment involving Pretest-Posttest Control Group Experimental Design. A Card scoring experiment procedure was carried out and this nonverbal method was intentionally chosen as it provided the most direct measure of rating, as though a respondent would put their vote or money, without developing a conceptual instrument to measure brand preferences or perceptions. Once the results were obtained, one-way ANOVA was used to compare the groups because it is considered the prototypical experimental design in which one treatment group is compared with one control group. The researcher found that when a CRM campaign was introduced to the group that was aware of the campaign, the group was more positive than those who were not aware and did not receive an intervention. The results from the study confirmed that participants experienced statistically significantly greater brand trust before and after intervention on KFC brand scores. The researcher concluded that the aware experimental group showed significant improvement in scores in favour of the brand with the CRM initiative.