Collective Moral Identity Projects: Authentic Brand Users Anti-Counterfeit Framework

The concept of moral identity has received considerable interest by consumer behavior scholars in the past decade (Winterich, Mittal, and Ross 2009). This is not surprising considering the intuitively appealing notion that consumers may construct their identities and act in accordance with what they believe are typical characteristics of being a good and honest person (Reed, Aquino, and Levy 2007). Although the identity relevance of morality is difficult to contest, scholars have argued that consumer movements dedicated to ethical consumption are considered too extreme to have any real effect on everyday consumption behavior (Devinney, Auger, and Eckhardt 2010). However, brand community research suggests that morality is central even when the main purpose of the community revolves around a consumption object such as a brand (Luedicke, Thompson, and Giesler 2010). We extend research on moral identity and ethical consumption by exploring the role of collective moral identity in an online consumption community. Specifically, in this research we draw upon social movement theory (Polletta and Jasper 2001; Snow et al. 1986), moral identity theory (Reed et al. 2007), and theories on social norm construction (Goffman 1974; Fine 2001) to explore how authentic brand users construct collective moral identity around the specific cause of “anticounterfeits”. The context of counterfeits is interesting because counterfeits represent a threat to the authentic brand user’s self-identity through perceived brand signal poaching (Berger and Ward 2010; Commuri 2009), but also a broader moral identity threat as counterfeits can be seen as unethical or damaging to society. In order to explore the implications of multiple identity threats, we specifically investigate the scripted social norm negotiation that occurs within the online community to shed light on the processes by which members construct and maintain individual moral identity while bridging multiple normative frameworks. For example, we investigate what happens when social norms constructed within the community are challenged by social norms that govern behavior in other social interactions, such as when an authentic brand user is faced with an opportunity to inform a friend that the gift received from a family member is a “fake”. Consequently, this research furthers our understanding of both individual and collective moral identity and the negotiation that concurrently creates and facilitates legitimization of authentic (i.e., non-counterfeit) brand use.