Authenticity, Change and the Stories Brands Tell

Consumers say they want authentic brands.

Marketers do, too.

Few concepts appear more frequently in brand strategy discussions than authenticity. When a brand loses relevance, marketers often worry that it has drifted from its roots. When a company considers entering a new market, targeting a new audience or updating its positioning, someone inevitably asks whether the change feels authentic.

Yet authenticity presents a dilemma.

Many of the world’s most admired brands have changed dramatically over time. They have introduced new products, adopted new voices, entered new categories and reinvented themselves for new generations. In some cases, those changes have been substantial enough that consumers from one era might barely recognize the brand’s expressions in another.

And yet many of these same brands continue to be viewed as authentic.

If authenticity requires preserving a brand exactly as it has always been, that shouldn’t be possible.

This raises an important question: What allows consumers to accept change in some cases while rejecting it in others?

One possibility is that consumers are not evaluating authenticity solely by whether a brand changes. They may be evaluating whether those changes feel consistent with the larger story they associate with the brand. In other words, authenticity may depend less on sameness and more on narrative consistency.

This is not a settled conclusion. Authenticity is a complex concept with a rich history in consumer research. But work from branding, consumer psychology and narrative theory suggests that narrative consistency may be one important way authenticity is established, maintained and expressed.

The Problem With Equating Authenticity and Sameness

When people talk about authenticity, they often talk about preservation.

An authentic restaurant still uses the original recipe. An authentic craft brand still makes products the way it always has. An authentic company remains true to its founding values and traditions.

There is certainly some truth in this. Heritage matters. Traditions matter. Continuity matters. Consumers often look for evidence that a brand has remained connected to its origins.

But authenticity cannot simply mean refusing to change.

Douglas Holt, the cultural branding scholar best known for How Brands Become Icons, provides a useful counterpoint. Holt demonstrates that some of the most enduring brands in the world have evolved repeatedly in response to changing cultural conditions. Rather than remaining fixed, they adapt to emerging tensions, new audiences and shifting cultural expectations.

Mountain Dew offers a useful illustration. Over several decades, the brand has moved from imagery associated with rural America to campaigns centered on youth culture, adventure and action-oriented lifestyles. The cultural references changed. The audiences changed. The expressions changed.

Yet consumers could still recognize something familiar in the brand.

What remained was not necessarily a particular execution or campaign. What remained was a broader narrative that could evolve while still feeling recognizable.

Holt’s work suggests that successful brands do not remain culturally relevant by standing still. They remain relevant by adapting in ways that preserve continuity with the larger myths and meanings that made them important in the first place.

If that is true, authenticity cannot simply mean never changing.

Why Consumers Experience Brands as Stories

One reason authenticity can survive change may be that consumers do not experience brands primarily as collections of attributes.

They experience them through stories.

Jennifer Aaker, a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and David Aaker, often called the father of modern branding, have argued that powerful brands are often built around signature stories rather than functional claims alone. These stories create coherence, meaning and strategic direction. They provide a framework through which consumers interpret what a brand stands for.

Jennifer Escalas, a professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, takes this idea a step further. Her research demonstrates that consumers frequently process brands through narrative structures and often integrate brand meaning into their own identities. When consumers become immersed in a brand narrative, they are more likely to develop self-brand connections and stronger emotional attachment.

Once consumers have incorporated a brand into their own self-story, changes to that brand may be interpreted through a deeply personal lens. The relationship is no longer just about product performance or functional benefits. It is also about meaning.

Dan McAdams, a Northwestern University psychologist and one of the leading scholars of Narrative Identity, has argued that identity itself is a narrative process. People create internalized stories that help explain who they are, how they became that person and where their lives are headed.

RealityCheck’s work on Narrative Power builds on this tradition. Narrative Power refers to the extent to which a brand plays a meaningful role in consumers’ narrative identities. The strongest brands often become more than products. They become symbols, tools and reference points that help people tell themselves stories about who they are and who they are trying to become.

Viewed through this lens, consumers are not simply evaluating products and communications. They are evaluating whether a brand continues to fit within a larger story they have come to understand and believe.

Narrative Consistency as a Lens on Authenticity

This is where narrative consistency becomes a useful concept.

When consumers encounter change, they may not be asking, “Has this brand changed?”

A more relevant question may be, “Does this change still fit the story I believe this brand represents?”

Stories evolve all the time. New characters appear. Circumstances shift. Challenges emerge. The setting changes. Yet audiences generally accept those developments as long as the story remains coherent.

The same principle may apply to brands.

A company can modernize its visual identity, enter new categories or update its messaging without necessarily undermining authenticity. What matters is whether consumers can connect those changes to the broader narrative they already associate with the brand.

In this sense, narrative consistency does not require repetition. It requires coherence.

Consumers may not expect brands to remain frozen in time. They may simply expect the story to continue making sense.

Consumers often accept change when they can connect it to an existing narrative. The same change can feel unsettling when that connection is missing.

When consumers can connect a new initiative to the larger narrative they already understand, change often feels like a natural next chapter. When that connection is missing, the same change may feel opportunistic, confusing or disconnected from the brand’s identity.

When Brand Evolution Feels Authentic

Every brand faces pressure to evolve. New generations enter the marketplace, technologies reshape consumer expectations and cultural norms continue to shift. For most organizations, the question is not whether change is necessary but how to pursue it without losing the meaning that made the brand valuable in the first place.

When evolution feels authentic, consumers can usually see how the new expression connects to the existing narrative.

A brand associated with creativity might introduce new technologies while remaining committed to helping people create. A brand built around exploration might enter adjacent categories while continuing to celebrate discovery and adventure. A financial services company might transform its digital experience while preserving its larger story about helping consumers gain confidence and control over their financial lives.

In each case, the visible expressions of the brand change. The underlying narrative remains recognizable.

Research on narrative transportation offers a useful parallel. Tom van Laer, a marketing scholar whose research focuses on how stories influence persuasion and consumer behavior, has shown that narratives help people organize information and create meaning. Stories reduce complexity because they provide a framework for understanding new information. Rather than evaluating every new development in isolation, people interpret it within an existing narrative structure.

Narrative consistency may serve a similar function for brands. It allows consumers to absorb change without feeling that the brand has become something fundamentally different.

When Brands Break Their Story

Of course, not all brand changes succeed.

Sometimes consumers react with confusion, skepticism or outright rejection. Marketers often explain these situations in tactical terms. The campaign missed the mark. The messaging lacked clarity. The product failed to resonate.

Those explanations may be correct.

But another possibility is that the change disrupted the brand’s narrative coherence.

Consumers could not understand how the new expression fit within the story they had come to associate with the brand.

The problem, in other words, was not change itself. It was the absence of narrative continuity.

Consumers often appear more willing to accept evolution than contradiction. They may embrace significant changes when those changes feel like a logical extension of the brand’s story. They are less likely to embrace changes that seem disconnected from that story.

When a brand suddenly adopts a new voice, pursues an unfamiliar purpose or enters a category that feels unrelated to its established meaning, consumers may experience a form of narrative disruption. The individual tactics may make sense on their own, but together they no longer form a coherent whole.

The story stops holding together.

And when the story no longer holds together, perceptions of authenticity may begin to erode.

What This Means for Brand Leaders

For brand leaders, this perspective suggests a different way of thinking about change.

Many organizations frame the challenge in terms of limits. How much can we change before consumers stop seeing us as authentic?

That question is understandable, but it may not be the most useful one.

A more productive question might be: What elements of our narrative must remain recognizable as we evolve?

That shift directs attention away from preserving every executional detail and toward understanding the deeper structure of brand meaning. It encourages leaders to think about the role the brand plays in people’s lives, the values it helps express and the larger cultural story it represents.

These questions sit at the center of RealityCheck’s work on Narrametric Analysis and Narrative Power. In fact, Narrative Consistency is one of the dimensions measured within our Narrative Power Index because it appears to capture an important aspect of how consumers evaluate a brand’s role in their lives.

The goal is not to prevent change.

The goal is to ensure that change remains connected to the story consumers already understand.

The Story Has to Hold Together

Authenticity remains one of the most important—and most misunderstood—concepts in branding.

The history of successful brands suggests that authenticity and change are not opposites. Strong brands evolve continuously as markets, technologies and cultures change around them. The challenge is maintaining continuity while doing so.

The research reviewed here suggests that narrative consistency may be one important mechanism through which authenticity is preserved. Consumers appear willing to accept considerable change when they can understand how that change fits within the broader story they associate with the brand.

If that interpretation is correct, the question facing brand leaders is not whether their brands should evolve.

It is whether consumers will still recognize the story when they do.

Because in the end, authenticity may depend less on preserving every expression of a brand than on preserving confidence that the story still makes sense.