ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of a thematic analysis of 15 interviews with senior public relations and marketing industry personnel regarding their ideas about brand authenticity and public relations. The result of the interviews are divergent, but reveal recurrent views about the nature of authenticity as it relates to brands, as well as some consistency of opinion about how to manage and protect brand authenticity in the long term. In particular, the aim was to question practitioners about the impact of new digital media on brand construction and management practices, and to see if the characteristics of digital media use have changed brand justificatory approaches. An initial list of potential participants was identified through compiling a database of relevant industry representative organisations, such as the Association of Measurement and Evaluation in Communications (AMEC), the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. In addition, PR Week’s survey of the Top 100 PR consultancies was used as a guide, as well as some contacts from the author’s own personal experience of working in the PR and branding industries. A question was then added inviting all interviewees to recommend further participants, thus implementing a snowball approach to further sampling. Interviewee responses were anonymised, but the range includes senior representatives from three public relations industry bodies, managers of in-house public relations departments, as well as managing directors from public relations and brand marketing agencies. The interviewees provide a broad spread across both commercial and non-commercial branding and reputation management activities. A number of deductive themes from existing academic literature were used within the survey questionnaire design which inevitably led to their appearance as variables, however, a number of inductive variables and their sub-themes also emerged. To avoid non-supportable distinctions between some very similar concepts and to ensure that ‘meaningful concepts and information were grouped under the selected themes’ (Halkoaho et al 2012:3) a number of powerful conceptual categories were identified (Joffe and Yardley 2004:61). In total seven categories, or major discourses, were identified from the interviews as being inherent to brand authenticity. These were: Atunement; Authentic Behaviour and Actions; Integrity; Fixed Vision and Values; Corporate Social Responsibility; Real-Time Interaction; and Customer Power.
