Abstract: Brand authenticity has functioned for roughly two decades as marketing's dominant trust-building vocabulary, yet a growing body of consumer research suggests that authenticity itself has become a manufactured, performable claim that sophisticated consumers increasingly discount, shifting their trust instead toward the narrative surrounding a brand, its founder story, its perceived struggle, its documented process, rather than toward the brand's institutional identity as such. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature underlying this shift, tracing the consumer authenticity construct from its origins in existential and object-based authenticity theory through the branding literature's operationalization of authenticity as a strategic asset, before examining the narrative transportation and self-brand connection literature that explains why a well-told story can generate consumer trust independent of and at times despite, skepticism toward the branded institution telling it. The review synthesizes foundational authenticity-in-consumption research, brand trust theory, narrative processing research and the more recent influencer and social-media literature documenting how manufactured authenticity performances have measurably eroded consumer confidence in brand-level authenticity claims specifically. Particular attention is given to the paradox this literature identifies: the same audiences who report high skepticism toward corporate authenticity claims simultaneously report strong trust in individual creators and story-based content, a pattern this paper terms post-authenticity marketing. The paper concludes that this shift does not represent the abandonment of authenticity as a consumer concern but its relocation from the brand as institution to the narrative as artifact and identifies longitudinal research tracking how quickly narrative-based trust itself becomes subject to the same skepticism cycle as brand-based authenticity claims as the central future research prospect.