Authenticity in horizontal marketing partnerships: A better measure of brand compatibility

摘要

Given the marketplace prominence of sponsorship, celebrity endorsement, co-branding and similar arrangements involving the pairing of brands in communications, valid methods to evaluate their effectiveness are of importance to both managers and researchers. While these relationships have traditionally been judged based on comparisons of the attributes of each brand (e.g. fit, congruity, similarity), we argue for the importance of evaluating the perceived authenticity of the relationship itself. To this end, this research adapts a perceived brand authenticity scale developed by Morhart et al. (2015) to a measure of horizontal marketing partnership authenticity (HMP-Authenticity). In three studies, the reliability, validity and nomological network of the adapted scale is shown. In a fourth study, diagnosticity of individual dimensions is explored. In a fifth study, a brief, 4-item scale is introduced and shown to give predictions consistent with those of the full scale.