Brand authenticity and brand defense: Mediating roles of trust and co-creation in Vietnam’s state-owned retail banking

Abstract

While brand authenticity has been identified as a key driver of consumer trust in service settings, the post-mechanisms of it, which refer to the translation of trust to actual brand defense behaviour remains empirically underexplored in state-owned bank settings. This research examines the sequential mediating role of brand trust and value co-creation on the relationship between brand authenticity and voluntary brand defense behaviour of retail banking customers in Vietnam.

Based on survey data from 275 customers of Agribank in the Northern Ho Chi Minh City area, collected using a two-phase sequential mixed-methods design, the study uses Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS 4.0 to evaluate the proposed structural model and test its hypotheses.

As per the results, brand authenticity significantly enhances brand trust and explains 46.9% of the variance in it. Consumer and firm brand trust positively affect value co-creation as well as brand defense behavior.  Significantly, value co-creation emerges as the strongest direct predictor of brand defense and partially mediates the relationship between brand trust and brand defense (VAF= 42.4%).

According to the study, trust is not enough to boost customer engagement behaviour such as brand defense on the part of consumers.  State-owned banks should create a structured co-creation mechanism to convert trust into active brand protection through managerial action.