Authenticity has become one of the common words used in modern advertising, with both marketers and ad agencies convinced that execution of an authentic ad is key to effective advertising and brand success (Morhart et al., 2015; Hallem et al., 2019). Specifically, prior research has suggested that authenticity provides a competitive edge in crowded marketplaces (Hallem et al., 2019), stimulates brand trust (Anderberg and Morris, 2006), helps and moderates emotional attachment to a brand (Hallem et al., 2019), is key to the success of cause-related marketing partnerships (Kotler et al., 2012) and helps consumers find genuineness, truth and virtue within their mix of consumption goals (Michael and Beverland, 2010). Authentic advertising can help create personal brand resonance and helps overcome consumer scepticism about advertising. While researchers report these effects of authenticity, there is no clear definition of what constitutes authenticity in an advertising campaign, thus highlighting the multidimensional notion of authenticity (Leigh et al., 2006). For example, in advertising literature, authenticity has been linked to a spokesperson’s trustworthiness (Stern, 1994). Some link it to a realistic plot (Deighton, Romer and MacQueen, 1989) and still others link it to an ad’s accurate representation of the brand (Beverland, Lindgreen and Vink, 2008). In other words, there are several dimensions to advertising authenticity that are relatable to physical attributes or the brand essence as evaluated by consumers using their lenses of personal experience (Grayson and Martinec, 2004). Additionally, authenticity cues may be more prominent in one context and setting than another, and understanding what makes up authenticity in digital CRM ads should be key to understanding the effectiveness of the advertising tactic.

In the following paragraphs and sections, two dimensions and antecedents of authenticity are conceptualised in the context of digital CRM advertising, these being the perceived donation amount and the ad-context congruence, as depicted in Figure 1. These variables were evaluated based on an arduous literature review of these concepts within traditional CRM and display advertising literature. This approach is sound, given the potential impact of the combined effects of donation magnitude and ad congruence in digital CRM display advertising that could exhibit effects found in traditional CRM, which has only seen limited and dated survey investigation in the context of digital advertising (e.g. Grobman, 2000; Yue and Chaturvedi, 2000; Hoefer, 2012). Notwithstanding, digital CRM advertising is widespread, as depicted in Appendix 1, and should benefit from guidance in academic research.

Examples of digital CRM advertising, such as Laithwaite’s offer to donate 3% of sales from cases of wine to the National Trust, and Arena Flowers’ offer to donate 25% of the selling price of flowers to Cancer Research on their websites, indicate that donation amounts can vary widely, ranging from very small amounts up to 50% of the product price. In this transaction-based approach to CRM, the consumer implicitly triggers a donation to charity when making the purchase. The results of this paper indicate that donation magnitude is a primary cue of authenticity in digital CRM ads because it can demonstrate the degree of honesty, fairness and legitimacy to base an authenticity claim in the design of the advertising. In fact, the donation amount in digital CRM ads and traditional CRM promotions is a primary campaign design element because marketers are faced with the decision of how to counterbalance reduced profits with support of a social cause. Although the impact of the amount on a social cause in digital advertising has not been a subject of discussion in the literature, it is sound thinking to draw from CRM literature to suggest that a higher amount would generate a more favourable authenticity assessment, a ‘warm glow’ feeling (Andreoni, 1989) and a more positive feeling toward the advertisement (Pracejus and Olsen, 2004; Arora and Henderson, 2007; Chang, 2008; Muller et al., 2014). The essence of a non-profit organisation (NPO) collaboration with a brand promotion is contingent on the potential financial benefit to the social cause.

When consumers make purchases linked to supporting a charity or cause, they may first focus on themselves because the utility that they gain (e.g. moral satisfaction) determines how they respond to the advertising. The utility of shopping with a social cause in mind is determined by both the cost of the shopping and the moral satisfaction of contributing to a good cause (Koschate-Fischer et al., 2012). As such, an individual’s favourable authenticity perception of a sales offer would create the feeling of moral satisfaction, or ‘warm glow’, which should increase with higher donation levels from the consumer’s standpoint (Andreoni, 1989; Koschate-Fischer et al., 2012). By contrast, when the donation amount is small compared to the price of the product, consumers who are information adept may consider the contribution insufficient, inducing scepticism toward supporting an NPO in this way. Therefore, their interest in purchasing to benefit an NPO cause may be significantly weakened and thus translate to an insignificant purchase intention.

Since the donation amount is part of a digital CRM ad’s executional or content cues, this implies that an authentic ad is one that is altruistic, genuine and fair with regard to the donation dimensions of the ad. In sum, the donation as an authenticity cue helps consumers identify the altruism, honesty and trustworthiness in digital CRM advertising.

The concept of congruence, or congruity, which means to ‘fit’, ‘ink’, or ‘match-up’ has been used to examine the relatedness between a brand and another entity. The underlying concept of congruence remains the same regardless of the terminological variants (Lee et al., 2017). In cause-related advertising, the congruence between a brand and social cause strengthens consumers’ attribution of corporate altruism and credibility (Rifon et al., 2004), and product purchase intention (Becker-Olsen et al., 2006; Lafferty et al., 2007; Bigné-Alcañiz et al., 2012). Digital advertising research corroborates these findings by showing that thematic congruence between an ad and the site content renders a product more appealing (Flores et al., 2014), generates more click-through (Cho, 2003), increases customer awareness and generates better attention and recall compared to an incongruent ad (Rieger et al., 2015; Zanjani et al., 2011). An ad’s context congruence also elicits favourable responses in terms of attitudes toward the ad (Choi and Rifon, 2002) and purchase intention (Jeong and King, 2010; Segev et al., 2014). Moreover, a much more recent investigation also revealed that congruence with the brand’s essence has a positive effect on purchases (Becker et al., 2019). Taken together, these findings suggest that authenticity is a projection of consumers’ beliefs, expectations and perspectives constructed from cues in the advertising, of which the perceived donation magnitude and ad-context congruence are critical elements in attributing authenticity and subsequent behaviours. This paper outlines a number of resulting hypotheses with the first stated as:

Further to the above discussion on the role of donation magnitude and ad-context congruence of the ad in creating the perception of advertising authenticity, it is essential to understand the relative impact of the two dimensions. Intuitively, the underlying strategy of the ad is to elicit and support consumers’ prosocial instincts when they are shopping. The non-profit partners of a firm have an expectation of a financial contribution more than anything else. The reputational risks for the social cause and the firm can be accounted for by the expected financial benefits from the advertising. Hence, this paper proposes that the magnitude of the donation offered to the social cause in designing the ad properties would constitute a more compelling feature than the perceived congruence of the ad context. Accordingly, the paper formally states that:

Consumers form beliefs concerning a brand’s causal attribution or reasons for embedding social responsibility in advertising. Specifically, these attributions are related to the perceived sincerity or authenticity of the social responsibility actions (Hildebrand et al., 2011). Social responsibility initiatives should be recognised as authentic to garner consumer support, and social responsibility programmes are perceived as authentic when they align with the brand’s identity (McShane and Cunningham, 2012). Research has revealed that when there is dissonance between the brand’s rhetoric and practice, it can substantially hurt the brand’s image (Tsai, 2009) by creating negative perceptions about the brand (Hildebrand et al., 2011).

There are four components of altruistic motives within consumer responses to advertising: value-driven motives, strategic-driven motives, selfish motives and stakeholder-driven motives (Ellen, Webb and Mohr 2006; Groza et al., 2011; Lee et al., 2009). Although attributional altruistic motives have not been the subject of many studies in extended models as in the current paper, two theoretical frameworks have been applied to develop an understanding of the effects of attributed altruistic motives on consumer responses to digital CRM advertising. Firstly, by applying studies by Ajzen and Fishbein (1970) and Bagozzi (1981), which employed a commonly used attitudinal framework of cognition (beliefs) and donation (action) intention, the context suggests that all the components of the attributional altruistic motive, except for stakeholder-driven motivation, can positively impact attitudes and purchase intention. Secondly, the paper draws from from Bergkvist and Taylor’s model of Leveraged Marketing Communications (LMC) that suggests a dual-path model of CRM persuasion effects. According to the model, CRM affects brand evaluations along an indirect transfer path, which is mediated by the attribution of motives and followed by a direct transfer path in which attitude towards the cause is transferred to the brand (Bergkvist and Zhou, 2018). The paper suggests that these frameworks can accurately clarify the effect of altruistic attributed motives and attitudes towards the ad in the context of the impact of perceived digital CRM ad authenticity. Hence, the paper proposes that:

The involvement factor has featured in several models investigating consumer behaviour in CRM (e.g., Hyllegard et al., 2011; Hajjat, 2013) and display advertising (e.g., Huang et al., 2010; Zanjani et al., 2011; Segev et al., 2014). These studies highlight that involvement plays a crucial role in moderating and explaining variable relationships. Hence, understanding how involvement might moderate the impact of perceived authenticity in CRM advertising will be essential to the development of more in-depth knowledge regarding how individual differences can impact the effectiveness of the ad. This paper evaluates involvement regarding how attention is paid to advertising with a social cause, which is indicative of a personal and enduring state of mind about a social cause. Involvement signifies personal values, needs, importance and interest, which modifies one’s experiences and impacts one’s involvement with the object (Zaichkowsky, 1986). Unlike other functional aspects of an advertisement, such as ad size and interactivity, the social cause associated with an ad can be deeply personal to a broad segment of the consumers. As such, the affective response toward an advertisement with an indication to support a social cause is likely to be amplified. Against this background, cause-involvement is expected to interplay with the perceived authenticity of the advertising to influence consumer responses. That is, the higher the relevance of the social cause, the stronger the scrutiny of the credibility and believability of the advertising. Also, a weak involvement with a social cause may not elicit an individual assessment of the brand’s motive. Accordingly, the paper hypothesises that:

To test the validity and reliability of each factor, our proposed model included a three-step data analysis approach: (1) data preparation; (2) exploratory factor analysis (EFA); (3) reliability test. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted using SPSS 26 and AMOS 26 statistical packages.

First, in preparing the data for analysis, it was necessary to excluded seven cases (<5%) from the data following data cleaning rules, as they exhibited evidence of unengaged responses. Since the factors are ordinal with seven intervals, extreme value outliers were not present. In addition, the factors were based on Likert-type scales, and there was no reason to exclude variables based on skewness (Gaskin, 2019). Thus, rather than testing skewness, the focus was on kurtosis (which was within +/– 1.00). Linearity was tested by performing curve estimation regression with SPSS for all direct effects in the proposed model, which showed that the relationships between variables were sufficiently linear (i.e., all p-values were less than 0.05). In addition, the results of the homoscedasticity test (scatter plot of zPred on zResid) indicated that the proposed mediators were sufficiently homoscedastic. The variable inflation factors (VIFs) test for all the exogenous variables showed they all had a value of less than 2.0, meaning they were distinct from each other (Gaskin, 2019).

Second, to estimate the model, a factor analysis (EFA) was conducted using principal components with Promax rotation and factor loading of ≥0.30 to test whether the observed variables loaded together as expected, were adequately correlated and met reliability and validity criteria (Table 1).

The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy and Bartlett’s test, p = 000 were employed, and the communalities for each variable were sufficiently high (>.6), thus indicating that the study variables were adequately correlated for factor analysis (Gaskin, 2019). All items of the proposed model loaded satisfactorily except for item PDA3, which was removed to achieve a clean EFA, as depicted in the pattern matrix (Table 1). Additionally, the reproduced matrix had only 1% non-redundant residuals higher than 0.05, which further confirmed the adequacy of the variables and the six-factor model. Importantly, all scales showed high internal consistency in the corresponding reflective indicators.

Third, analysis confirmed the convergent and discriminant validity of the data where for all factors the average variance extracted (AVE) was above 0.50 (Anderson and Gerbing, 1988; Hu and Bentler, 1999; Malhotra and Dash, 2011), and all factors demonstrated adequate discriminant validity because the diagonal values in Table 2 were greater than the correlations (Gaskin, 2019). The composite reliability (CR) of each factor attained the threshold of 0.70 (Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994; Hair et al., 2006). Hence it can be concluded that there was enough reliability for the factors to proceed with further analysis.

Also, since all the latent factors showed high internal consistency of the corresponding reflexive observed items, composites were created for use in further analysis by averaging the values of the items.

The analysis confirmed the convergent and discriminant validity of the data where for all factors the average variance extracted (AVE) was above 0.50, and all factors demonstrated adequate discriminant validity because the diagonal values in Table 3 were greater than the correlations (Gaskin, 2019). The composite reliability (CR) of each factor attained the threshold of 0.70, hence it can be concluded that there was sufficient reliability for the factors to proceed with further analysis. Also, since all the latent factors showed high internal consistency of the corresponding reflexive observed items, composites were created for use in further analysis by averaging the values of the items.

It is widely claimed that authenticity is a major driver of advertising success (Hallem et al., 2019; Becker et al., 2019). However, it is not clear what authenticity means in different contexts and situations. This research presents an initial attempt to shed light on the concept of authenticity in the context of digital CRM advertising and its impact on consumers’ intention to purchase. The paper provides evidence that the cumulative effect of perceived donation amount and ad-context congruence can define the authenticity of the ad. The identification of the two dimensions implies that marketers can use the term ‘authenticity’ more specifically in internal and external communications when, for example, working with a digital creative designer. Our research thus helps create the basis for more fruitful and targeted communications.

Second, advertisers must appreciate consumers’ altruistic attribution motives in the ad. The results of the paper show that consumers attempt to make attributions of the firm’s support to the social cause. Thus, any managerial decision that improves perceptions of company trustworthiness (e.g., increased donations) will also increase perceptions of the altruistic image as more legitimate, genuine and sound, which significantly improves consumer attitudes and responses towards the ad. Even the ad congruence with the NPO’s cause website context, renders the ad more legitimate and genuine. This contextual coherence cue makes it possible for consumers to form favourable attitudes towards the ad, leading to the intention to support the advertising.

Finally, regarding the interplay of authenticity and consumers’ personal attributes, the results of this paper did not support claims that consumers with greater involvement in social causes would demonstrate a higher intention to purchase given a higher degree of perceived authenticity. This finding can be more broadly taken to suggest that the ad could be used for effective targeting of a more diverse consumer segment in terms of differences in connection with the social cause.

While the present paper extends the understanding of existing advertising authenticity and CRM research in several ways and provides essential theoretical and managerial implications for digital advertising, a significant limitation should be mentioned. Recognising this should help refine future research efforts.

A significant limitation to this paper is that the design and placement of the ad stimuli on a charity website rather than the commercial brand website renders the study more focused on the charitable cause than the commercial brand. As a result, the proposed model may not be generalisable to a context where the brand is a central focus.

There are two possible directions in which this study can be extended. First, given that this paper found the effect of authenticity is only partially mediated by attributed firm altruistic motive and attitudes towards the ad as a fundraiser there could be other significant mediators of authenticity to be identified, which considered together can fully explain the positive relationship between authenticity and intention to purchase.

Second, future research should attempt to replicate these results and determine the differential impact of donation amount and congruence in models containing a variety of additional moderating constructs, such as ‘familiarity’ with the brand or social causes.

Despite the limitation indicated, the results in this paper demonstrate that the perceived donation amount and the relevance of the ad constitute the authenticity of digital CRM ads, and the altruistic motives attributed to the brand and attitudes towards the advertisement as a fundraiser determine the intention to purchase to a large extent.