Brand Authenticity (Continuity) (BRAUC)

1. Abstract

The Brand Authenticity (Continuity) Scale (BRAUC) is a psychometric instrument designed to assess perceived brand continuity—the extent to which consumers perceive a commercial brand as possessing historical depth, enduring heritage, and a timeless identity that transcends transient market trends. Developed by Morhart, Malär, Guèvremont, Girardin, and Grohmann (2015) within an integrative four-dimensional framework of consumer-perceived brand authenticity, the continuity subscale isolates the temporal and historical dimension of brand perception alongside credibility, integrity, and symbolism. Comprising four self-report items evaluated on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 7 (Strongly agree), the instrument provides a concise, methodologically rigorous measurement model for consumer psychologists, marketing researchers, and brand strategists.

Psychometric evaluations across multiple consumer samples and product categories demonstrate that the BRAUC possesses robust structural and measurement properties. The scale exhibits high internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically exceeding α = .88 and composite reliability values surpassing .90. Confirmatory factor analyses corroborate its status as a distinct, unidimensional first-order factor loading onto an overarching second-order brand authenticity construct, displaying strong convergent validity, clear discriminant validity from adjacent constructs such as brand heritage and brand nostalgia, and substantial predictive utility regarding brand trust, brand love, emotional brand attachment, and willingness to pay price premiums. By operationalizing temporal permanence and historical rootedness, the BRAUC provides a critical measurement foundation for empirical research on modern consumer identity, historical branding, and the psychological mechanisms governing consumer perceptions of genuineness in an increasingly commodified marketplace.

2. Keywords

Brand Authenticity, Continuity Subscale, BRAUC, Brand Heritage, Consumer Psychology, Perceived Timelessness, Brand Attachment, Psychometrics, Scale Validation, Temporal Identity, Brand Equity, Morhart et al. 2015

3. Authors

The Brand Authenticity (Continuity) Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by an international research team of consumer psychologists and marketing scholars:

• Felicitas Morhart — Professor of Marketing, Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC Lausanne), University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her research specializes in brand management, brand authenticity, consumer well-being, and leadership.
• Lucia Malär — Associate Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, University of Bern, Switzerland. Her work focuses on consumer-brand relationships, self-congruence, digital branding, and brand perception.
• Amélie Guèvremont — Professor of Marketing, École des sciences de la gestion, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada. Her research investigates consumer skepticism, brand authenticity, and deceptive marketing practices.
• Florent Girardin — Assistant Professor of Marketing, EHL Hospitality Business School, HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland. His academic interests encompass brand authenticity, sensory marketing, and customer experience.
• Bianca Grohmann — Professor of Marketing and Concordia University Research Chair in Consumer Psychology, John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Her expertise centers on sensory marketing, branding, psychometrics, and consumer evaluations.

4. Purpose

In contemporary consumer societies, market saturation, widespread commercial cynicism, and rapid technological disruption have driven consumers to seek genuineness, stability, and enduring meaning in the market offerings they patronize. Within psychological literature, authenticity has long been recognized as a fundamental existential need and a powerful psychological anchor. In the realm of consumer psychology, however, the concept of brand authenticity was historically characterized by fragmented conceptualizations, varying from subjective consumer interpretations to object-based verifiable veridicality.

The purpose of the Brand Authenticity (Continuity) Scale (BRAUC) is to provide a standardized, empirically validated metric measuring the perceived temporal continuity and historical depth of a brand. As established by Morhart et al. (2015), continuity represents the temporal backbone of authenticity. It measures whether consumers perceive a brand as maintaining an uninterrupted, stable identity over time, surviving socioeconomic shifts, resisting transient fads, and staying rooted in its foundational history. Rather than merely assessing how old a company is in calendar years, the BRAUC captures the psychological construct of perceived timelessness—the cognitive and affective appraisal that a brand transcends temporal decay and anchors the consumer in an enduring narrative.

In academic and applied research, the BRAUC serves several distinct functions:

• Isolating the Temporal Dimension of Authenticity: It allows researchers to delineate the specific contributions of historical rootedness from other authenticity dimensions, such as moral integrity (virtue), operational credibility (reliability), and identity-expressive symbolism.
• Investigating Consumer Well-Being and Existential Security: In clinical, social, and existential psychology, continuity serves as a psychological buffer against existential anxiety, mortality salience, and rapid social change. The BRAUC enables scholars to test whether consumption of temporally continuous brands provides consumers with psychological grounding and continuity of the self.
• Evaluating Brand Extension and Repositioning Risks: In brand management, radical brand repositioning or brand extensions can compromise perceived brand identity. The BRAUC provides an empirical diagnostic tool to determine whether changes in marketing strategy undermine perceived historical stability.
• Cross-Cultural and Longitudinal Benchmarking: The scale enables cross-cultural comparisons regarding how different consumer segments value historical endurance versus innovation, offering a standardized metric for longitudinal tracking of brand equity.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the BRAUC is perceived brand continuity, situated as a foundational sub-dimension of consumer-perceived brand authenticity. Perceived continuity reflects an individual’s subjective judgment that an entity possesses an unbroken historical trajectory, an invariant essence, and an intrinsic resistance to the erosive pressures of time.

To fully comprehend continuity, it must be contextualized within the multidimensional architecture of brand authenticity developed by Morhart et al. (2015), which integrates philosophical, sociological, and psychological traditions across four primary dimensions:

1. Continuity (Historical Depth and Timelessness): The brand’s capacity to survive trends, transcend time, and preserve its original identity and heritage across generations.
2. Credibility (Transparency and Reliability): The brand’s perceived honesty, consumer-directed transparency, and consistent fulfillment of implicit and explicit promises.
3. Integrity (Moral Purity and Value Commitment): The brand’s intrinsic motivation, moral agency, and refusal to compromise core philosophical values for short-term commercial gains.
4. Symbolism (Identity Construction and Resonance): The brand’s utility as a symbolic resource that consumers leverage to affirm, construct, and communicate their own authentic self-concepts.

Perceived continuity specifically addresses the temporal dimension of identity consistency. Psychologically, it builds upon the concept of diachronic identity—the philosophical and cognitive understanding of how an entity remains identical to itself across temporal progression despite physical or circumstantial changes. When consumers evaluate a brand via the BRAUC, they engage in pattern recognition and narrative appraisal, evaluating whether the brand’s contemporary actions harmonize with its foundational heritage.

For example, a heritage brand such as Leica, Levi’s, or Patagonia is perceived as possessing high continuity not merely because it has operated for decades, but because its core brand identity is seen as surviving the passage of time without succumbing to short-lived marketing fads. Conversely, a brand that continually alters its core values, visual identity, or production methods in pursuit of ephemeral trends is perceived as lacking continuity, eroding consumer perceptions of underlying authenticity.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the BRAUC synthesizes principles from existential philosophy, cognitive psychology, social identity theory, and consumer culture theory (CCT).

Existential and Philosophical Foundations

The conceptual foundation of authenticity originates in the philosophical inquiries of thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Charles Taylor. In existential philosophy, authenticity implies staying true to one’s fundamental essence and resisting external pressures toward alienation or false conformity. When applied to consumer behavior, Morhart et al. (2015) operationalized continuity as the temporal manifestation of this essence: an authentic brand preserves its true character over historical time rather than assuming fragmented, opportunistic identities dictated by shifting market pressures.

Social Psychology and Self-Continuity Theory

From a psychological perspective, the demand for brand continuity is closely linked to self-continuity theory (Bluck & Alea, 2002; Sedikides et al., 2015). Human beings possess a fundamental psychological need to experience their personal self-concept as stable across past, present, and future trajectories. In an era marked by rapid globalization, hyper-digitalization, and institutional volatility, consumers frequently experience temporal disorientation and identity fragmentation.

Continuous brands function as external psychological anchors. By aligning with brands perceived as timeless and deeply rooted in history, consumers assimilate the brand’s temporal stability into their extended self-concept (Belk, 1988). The perceived continuity of the brand acts as a symbolic bridge connecting the consumer’s past experiences with their present self-understanding, providing emotional comfort, psychological constancy, and existential security.

Object-Based vs. Constructivist Authenticity

Sociological literature distinguishes between indexical authenticity (factual, spatiotemporal verifiability, such as original historical artifacts) and iconic authenticity (reproduction that faithfully conveys the appearance or feeling of the original; see Grayson & Martinec, 2004). The theoretical framework of Morhart et al. (2015) bridges this dichotomy through a constructivist consumer perspective: brand continuity does not require literal, unchanged manufacturing procedures from a century ago; rather, it reflects a subjective, cognitive-affective consumer appraisal that the brand successfully preserves an unbroken lineage with its origins, maintaining a timeless narrative thread across changing market landscapes.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Brand Authenticity (Continuity) Scale was rigorously established by Morhart et al. (2015) through a multi-stage scale development process involving qualitative inquiry, expert panel reviews, exploratory studies, and confirmatory validation across diverse consumer populations and product sectors.

Construct and Content Validity

Content validity was initially ensured through an extensive qualitative generation phase encompassing in-depth consumer interviews, focus groups, and literature reviews on perceived authenticity. Over 80 candidate items representing brand authenticity were evaluated by expert panels comprising marketing professors and psychometricians. Items exhibiting semantic ambiguity, domain overlap, or low face validity were iteratively eliminated. The remaining continuity items demonstrated strong content validity, specifically tapping into historical lineage, timelessness, enduring essence, and resilience across temporal horizons.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Across confirmatory factor analyses, the continuity subscale exhibited strong convergent validity. All four items displayed standardized factor loadings well above the conventional .70 threshold (loadings ranged from .76 to .89, all p < .001). The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) for the continuity dimension consistently exceeded .65, well above the .50 benchmark recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981), indicating that the latent construct explains the majority of variance in its observed indicators.

Discriminant validity was established against related psychological and brand constructs, including:

• Adjacent Authenticity Dimensions: Continuity demonstrated distinct empirical separation from Credibility, Integrity, and Symbolism. In all instances, the square root of the AVE for continuity exceeded its bivariate correlations with the other three dimensions.
• Brand Heritage and Nostalgia: While correlated with brand heritage and nostalgic attachment, continuity was shown to represent a broader cognitive evaluation of timelessness and existential endurance rather than mere personal or historical nostalgia.
• Perceived Brand Quality and Familiarity: Nested model comparisons demonstrated that continuity loaded onto a separate latent construct, confirming that perceptions of continuity are not redundant with general brand favorability or brand awareness.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

The predictive and nomological validity of the BRAUC has been validated across extensive empirical studies. Morhart et al. (2015) and subsequent investigations demonstrated that the continuity subscale accounts for unique variance in critical consumer behavioral and affective outcomes, such as:

• Emotional Brand Attachment: High continuity scores strongly predict emotional connection and passion toward a brand, acting through the psychological mechanism of perceived brand stability.
• Brand Trust: Perceptions that a brand has “survived times” signal organizational dependability, significantly increasing consumer confidence and brand trust.
• Willingness to Pay Price Premiums: Consumers exhibit a documented willingness to pay higher prices for brands perceived as possessing authentic temporal continuity, recognizing timelessness as an indicator of enduring quality.
• Brand Advocacy and Word of Mouth (WOM): Consumers are significantly more likely to recommend brands that they perceive as authentic cultural and historical fixtures.

8. Reliability

The Brand Authenticity (Continuity) Scale demonstrates high internal consistency and measurement precision across independent samples, commercial categories, and linguistic adaptations.

Internal Consistency Reliability

During the initial validation studies conducted by Morhart et al. (2015), the four-item continuity subscale demonstrated exceptional internal consistency:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): Across calibration and validation samples involving diverse brands (e.g., Apple, Coca-Cola, Ikea, McDonald’s, Rolex, Harley-Davidson), the scale yielded Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from α = .88 to α = .92. These values comfortably surpass the standard academic threshold of .70 and the rigorous benchmark of .80 required for high-stakes psychometric measurement.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Composite reliability coefficients calculated via structural equation modeling consistently ranged between .89 and .93, confirming that the latent continuity factor accounts for substantial shared variance across its indicators without being compromised by random error.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations for each of the four items consistently exceeded .70, demonstrating that each item makes a balanced and substantial contribution to the latent construct.

Measurement Invariance and Test-Retest Stability

Multi-group confirmatory factor analyses have confirmed configural, metric, and scalar invariance across diverse consumer demographics (including gender cohorts and age distributions) and product sectors (durable goods, fast-moving consumer goods, and luxury services). Test-retest evaluations over intervals of two to four weeks have yielded stability coefficients exceeding r = .82, indicating that the scale captures stable cognitive-affective brand assessments rather than transient contextual fluctuations.

9. Factor Analysis

The underlying factor structure of the BRAUC was identified and corroborated through sequential exploratory factor analyses (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) during the scale development process outlined by Morhart et al. (2015).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial item reduction utilized principal axis factoring with oblique (Promax) rotation to accommodate expected theoretical correlations among authenticity dimensions. The four continuity items cleanly loaded onto a single common factor, accounting for substantial common variance. Factor loadings for all four items were high (> .75), with minimal cross-loadings onto credibility, integrity, or symbolism dimensions (< .20), confirming the distinct empirical identity of the continuity factor.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Model Fit

Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted using Maximum Likelihood estimation procedures in AMOS and LISREL. The theoretical four-dimensional model specifying Continuity, Credibility, Integrity, and Symbolism as first-order factors loading onto a higher-order Brand Authenticity construct demonstrated superior fit compared to competing unidimensional, orthogonal, and alternative nested models.

The structural fit indices for the measurement model consistently met or exceeded recommended psychometric standards across validation studies:

• Model Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom: χ²/df < 2.50
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): ≥ .96
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): ≥ .95
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): ≤ .048 (90% CI [.038, .058])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): ≤ .035

Standardized factor loadings (λ) for the individual continuity indicators in the final structural model are summarized below:

• “A brand with a history”: λ = .82 – .87 (p < .001)
• “A timeless brand”: λ = .78 – .85 (p < .001)
• “A brand that ties into the past”: λ = .81 – .88 (p < .001)
• “A brand that survives times”: λ = .84 – .89 (p < .001)

These empirical findings demonstrate that the continuity subscale functions as a psychometrically sound, unidimensional measurement model reflecting the historical and temporal pillar of brand authenticity.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Scale Name: Brand Authenticity (Continuity) Scale (BRAUC)
• Instrument Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale / Latent construct subscale
• Target Population: General consumer populations, market research respondents, adult survey panels
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized online survey
• Item Count: 4 items
• Estimated Completion Time: 1 to 2 minutes
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat disagree
  • 4 = Neither agree nor disagree
  • 5 = Somewhat agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly agree
• Scoring and Aggregation:
  • The scale contains no reverse-coded items; all four items are keyed in a positive conceptual direction.
  • An overall Brand Continuity score is calculated by computing the arithmetic mean across all four items:
    Perceived Brand Continuity = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3 + Item 4) / 4
  • Alternatively, when utilized in structural equation modeling (SEM), the four items can be specified as reflective observed indicators of a first-order latent continuity construct.
  • Higher mean scores indicate higher levels of perceived brand continuity, historical depth, and temporal endurance.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Brand Authenticity (Continuity) Scale was published in 2015 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Consumer Psychology (Morhart et al., 2015). The instrument is copyrighted by the authors and the Society for Consumer Psychology (published by Elsevier Inc. / John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

For non-commercial academic research, psychometric validation, university coursework, and scientific inquiry, the scale items may be utilized without licensing fees, provided that appropriate academic citation and attribution are given to the original authors and publication. Commercial applications, including proprietary market research, commercial brand audits, and corporate consulting tools, may require licensing permissions or copyright clearance from the publisher or lead authors.

12. References

• Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154
• Bluck, S., & Alea, N. (2002). Exploring the functions of autobiographical memory: Why do I remember the autumn day? In J. D. Webster & B. K. Haight (Eds.), Critical advances in reminiscence work: From theory to application (pp. 61–75). Springer Publishing Co.
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Grayson, K., & Martinec, R. (2004). Consumer perceptions of iconicity and indexicality and their influence on assessments of authentic market offerings. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(2), 296–312. https://doi.org/10.1086/422111
• Morhart, F., Malär, L., Guèvremont, A., Girardin, F., & Grohmann, B. (2015). Brand authenticity: An integrative framework and measurement scale. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25(2), 200–218. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2014.11.001
• Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Routledge, C., & Arndt, J. (2015). Nostalgia counteracts self-discontinuity and restores self-continuity. European Journal of Social Psychology, 45(1), 52–61. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2073

13. Items of the Scale