Corporate ethics and conscientious brands: convergent evidence for brand authenticity amid structural and intellectual fragmentation

Abstract

Abstract Corporate ethics and conscientious branding have attracted growing academic and managerial attention as firms face increasing demands for responsible conduct, sustainability, and credible brand positioning. This study examines the evolution, intellectual structure, and thematic development of the field through a bibliometric analysis of 1322 articles published between 1990 and July 2026 and indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. Performance analysis and science-mapping techniques reveal a prolonged period of limited production, followed by an inflection in 2018–2019 and rapid growth after 2020, with publication output peaking at 253 articles in 2025. Despite this expansion, the field remains structurally fragmented across 512 journals and 82 countries and is characterized by a small collaborative core. Co-citation analysis and global citation rankings independently identify brand authenticity, rather than stakeholder theory, as the field’s dominant intellectual anchor. However, a supplementary Jaccard analysis found that reference overlap between brand authenticity and ESG/greenwashing research was descriptively lower than the corpus-wide baseline, indicating that these prominent streams remain intellectually distinct. Based on these findings, the study proposes an evidence-based framework linking brand authenticity to customer-based brand equity, while treating integration with ESG/greenwashing scholarship as a future research challenge. Managerially, the results suggest that ethical and sustainability claims require credible organizational substantiation rather than generic promotional messaging. The proposed research agenda emphasizes theoretical integration, cross-contextual validation, and the ethical implications of digital transformation.