The impact of brand authenticity on brand attachment, brand loyalty, willingness to pay more, and forgiveness - For Chinese consumers of Korean cosmetic brands.

Despite the corona-virus pandemic, Korean cosmetics maintain brand attachment in the Chinese market. This study identifies critical influencing and outcome factors of brand attachment within this consumer phenomenon. Specifically, it investigates the relationship between Chinese consumers' perceived brand authenticity and brand attachment, brand loyalty, willingness to pay a premium, and forgiveness. To this end, it uses AMOS 21.0 to analyze data collected through a questionnaire, testing the research model. The study reveals several key findings. Firstly, it assesses brand authenticity based on the following five sub-factors: consistency, naturalness, originality, advertisement truthfulness, and reliability. According to the assessment results, originality shows the most significant impact, followed by reliability, consistency, and naturalness. Furthermore, brand attachment significantly enhances brand loyalty, willingness to pay a premium, and forgiveness toward the brand. Higher levels of brand attachment lead to increased brand loyalty. In addition, greater brand attachment correlates with consumers' increased willingness to pay more for products and greater forgiveness towards the brand.
Competing Interests: The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: You-Yu Dai reports administrative support was provided by 10.13039/501100009017Shandong Jiaotong University. You-Yu Dai reports statistical analysis was provided by China Society of Logistics and China Federation of Logistics & Purchasing. Honyun Wang reports investigation support was provided by Shandong Provincial Office of Philosophy and Social Science Work. Yan Wang reports data curation was provided by Shandong Provincial Bureau of Statistics. The corresponding author sometimes serves as a reviewer for Heliyon - YYD. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(© 2024 The Authors.)