Discovering a Rosetta Stone for Firm-Side Authenticity:An Empirical Investigation

While most academic research has considered authenticity from the consumer's perspective, this paper proposes and tests a new empirical operationalisation of Beverland's (2005) widely cited proposition that firm-side authenticity is"…partly true and partly rhetorical" (p. 1008). Our study presents a model based on the Competitive Advantage (CA) that results from congruence between the partly true aspects of the firm's internal culture, resources, and capabilities measured as Innovation Capacity (IC),alongside Corporate Identity Management (CIM) as the organisation's partly rhetorical outwardly-directed corporate branding and marketing promotions activities. Our findings are interpreted through a four-quadrant 'Rosetta Stone' framework for evaluating firm-side authenticity across organisational contexts and environments describing how high-IC/ high-CIM (i.e., Authentic) firms create differentiation from low-IC/ low-CIM Inauthentic organisations and low-IC/ high-CIM Faux Imitators competitors who attempt to compensate for their lack of IC through increased investments in CIM.