Authenticity Essay

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Chapter 2: Literature Review
In this chapter, the concept of authenticity will be discussed and analyzed as a general construct and in the context of branding and marketing, as well as the authentic leadership traits attributed to individuals, alongside a brief overview of the social media networks and the authentic behaviour of their users online. As many artists act as brands today and reveal detailed information about themselves while engaging with their followers through social media networks, studying the effects of such direct-to-fan communication on authenticity may be useful to artists, management and record labels, as it threatens the established models of creating artist identity.
Authenticity
The phenomenon of authenticity has been examined by investigating authenticity attributes (Beverland, 2005a; Leigh et al., 2006), authenticity forms (Beverland, Lindgreen, and Vink, 2008), the influence of personal goals on authenticating (Beverland and Farrelly, 2009), hyper-authenticity in television viewing (Rose and Wood, 2005), authenticity cues (Grayson and Martinec, 2004), staged authenticity in the tourist and leisure sector (Chhabra, 2005, Goulding, 2000, Goulding, 2001, MacCannell, 1973 and Wang, 1999), and authenticity negotiation and commoditization (Cohen, 1988).
In business research, the construct of authenticity has been used in different ways to imply different meanings, commonly referring to the genuineness or the originality of something and often associated with concepts such as being natural or honest (Kennick, 1985; Fine, 2003; Boyle, 2003). Authenticity is often personally or socially constructed (Grayson and Martinec, 2004; Leigh et al., 2006) and tends to be experienced differently, as individuals (Sheldon, ...

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...itively evaluate brand extensions when they gauge the similarities between the parent brand category and the extension category (Aaker and Keller 1990; Boush and Loken 1991; Dawar 1996; Herr, Farquhar, and Fazio 1996) and, given artists are also considered to be authentic, if they uphold the traditions of their music genres (Peterson, 1997; McLeod, 2006), it is argued that fans perceive artists as brand extensions of their genre and therefore, the Brand Extension Authenticity (BAE) conceptual definition is adopted alongside the developed BEA inventory for the purpose of this research. Similarly, given artists are the driving force and inspiration within their respective communities of followers (REF????, ????), it is contended that the authentic leadership concepts and scales could be applied as a measuring device for the purpose of evaluating artists authenticity.

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