The relationship between brand legitimacy, brand reputation, and brand status

The majority of marketing research on legitimacy focuses on macro-level phenomena, such as market creation or the legitimation of novel consumption practices (e.g., yoga, casino gambling). These studies predominantly rely on collective perceptions and often use proxies to measure legitimacy. In contrast, research examining legitimacy at the brand level remains limited. Existing work in this domain is heavily influenced by organizational literature and institutional theory, emphasizing the judgments of professional stakeholders such as business partners, investors, and public authorities. Consequently, the consumer perspective has been largely overlooked, representing an important gap in the literature. Addressing this gap, we leverage the development of a novel, valid, and reliable scale of brand legitimacy based on individual consumer assessments and demonstrate (N = 485), that brand legitimacy is distinct from other collective-level constructs, such as brand reputation and brand status. Moreover, we explain how these three constructs relate to one another.