Exploring Video Game Brand Authenticity

Ensuring effective brand management and strong relationships with consumers is particularly important in the video game industry because it relies heavily on established brands for sales from continuations, extensions, and tie-in merchandise (Burgess & Jones 2020). The extant video game brand management literature has investigated brand continuations in the video game industry (Butcher et al. 2017), and video game brand communities (Burgess & Jones 2020; Weijo et al. 2017). However, there are important aspects of video game brand management that remain under-explored such as brand authenticity, which involves a brand being perceived by its consumers as dedicated to ideals and having a core set of values (Johnson et al. 2015). These ideals and values are created by stable, consistent brand behavior (Moulard et al. 2015), and are thus co-created by consumers and brands (Preece 2015). Behavior that consumers perceive as being inconsistent reduces their perceptions of brand authenticity (Fritz et al. 2017). This research explored how players evaluated the brand authenticity of a long running, successful video game series to begin to address the lack of video game brand authenticity research as well as answering calls to better understand the video game industry from a business perspective (Alpert 2007; Teng 2017).