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Authenticity in the consumption context is an important topic within the marketing literature. This article explores authenticity's multiplicity of meanings within the MG brand subculture of consumption. An ethnographic approach guided data collection, which included participant observation, photo and document reviews, informal conversations, and formal, in-depth interviews with 58 MG owners. The data show that MG owners gain a sense of authenticity in the consumption context via the object and its ownership, consumer experiences, and identity construction and confirmation. As an object, an MG is authentic if it broaches an ideal standard and preserves the brand heritage. An MG experience is authentic when an owner interacts with the car through driving and self-work activities. Finally, an MG owner authenticates his or her identity through role performance and communal commitment. Implications are discussed in light of brand management.
Keywords: brand authenticity; consumer subcultures; subcultural capital; brand heritage; existential authenticity; brand community
Because of the increasingly contrived and inauthentic nature of contemporary life, scholars have debated the role of authenticity in American culture. In particular, Boorstin (1964) highlighted the growing everyday prevalence of pseudoevents, or media-driven constructions, designed to deceive and influence an audience. He argued that American consumers uncritically revel in the escapist, constructed reality that embodies pseudoevents. His thesis was that reality or originality gets lost in the construction, as the tinkered-with copy or re-creation becomes publicly familiar and accepted. Accordingly, Americans inhabit a world in which
fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. (p. 37)
Scholars have extended this view beyond the notion of the media with attention to consumption practices. For example, Baudrillard (1988) asserted that today's social and consumption experiences lack depth, originality, and a sense of place. He used the term simulacrum to capture the cultural order of contemporary consumption as an outgrowth of hypercreation, which admits or reveals no originals or any real references; in this view, the boundaries between real and fake are blurred. Baudrillard argued that the inauthentic products of this arrangement appear so authentic that they achieve the condition of reality.
Ritzer's...