Abstract:
The study investigates the impact of brand authenticity on brand trust, and causerelated
marketing (CRM) and examines the relationship between these three
constructs. Although the literature identified several properties of authenticity, the
relative importance of each construct and attribute in terms of influencing the brand
trust of consumers for a brand with CRM was yet to be determined. There was a gap
in understanding how brand authenticity influences brand trust and CRM from
consumers’ perspective, a research problem that this study addressed. This study was
conducted from a consumer’s perspective, within the fast-food industry using Kentucky
Fried Chicken (KFC) CRM as the experiment intervention.
The fast-food industry was chosen as the research context because it is very sensitive
to CRM on the fact that fast-food is perceived to prioritise profit at the expense of
society. A total of 151 South African consumers participated in the experiment. The
research approach adopted for this study was Quantitative using a field experiment
involving Pretest-Posttest Control Group Experimental Design. A Card scoring
experiment procedure was carried out and this nonverbal method was intentionally
chosen as it provided the most direct measure of rating, as though a respondent would
put their vote or money, without developing a conceptual instrument to measure brand
preferences or perceptions.
Once the results were obtained, one-way ANOVA was used to compare the groups
because it is considered the prototypical experimental design in which one treatment
group is compared with one control group. The researcher found that when a CRM
campaign was introduced to the group that was aware of the campaign, the group was
more positive than those who were not aware and did not receive an intervention. The
results from the study confirmed that participants experienced statistically significantly
greater brand trust before and after intervention on KFC brand scores. The researcher
concluded that the aware experimental group showed significant improvement in
scores in favour of the brand with the CRM initiative.
