How retailers build authenticity over time: A longitudinal study of transparency, frontline brand enactment, customer-company identification, and sales growth

Retailer authenticity is treated as a commercial asset, yet its relevance may depend on identity conversion. This longitudinal study separates retailer-controlled evidence from customers' higher-order authenticity judgments and from the self-definitional response that follows. Retailer transparency supplies informational evidence concerning disclosure, clarity, accuracy, and candor, whereas frontline brand enactment supplies behavioral evidence that employees embody the retailer's professed identity. Three waves of matched survey data from 10,214 loyalty customers nested in 208 stores in China are linked to a 12-month archival comparable-sales-growth window beginning during the closing month of Time 3. Multilevel longitudinal structural equation modeling indicates temporally ordered positive associations from Time 1 transparency and frontline brand enactment to Time 2 authenticity, from Time 2 authenticity to Time 3 customer-company identification, and from store-level identification to follow-up sales growth. The direct authenticity-growth association is not reliable after identification is modeled. The authenticity-identification association is stronger at higher prestige, recorded frontline interaction frequency, and brand familiarity, consistent with proposed conditions of cue diagnosticity and identity relevance. The study's central contribution is an evidence-judgment-identity-performance account: the observed pattern links authenticity with commercial performance through identification, without establishing that this is its only pathway or that a direct premium is absent. The field design establishes temporal order and covariation, not random assignment or causal identification.