Current Issue Summary
March 2021 (Vol. 61, Issue 1)

How a CEO’s Personality, Performance, and Leadership Predict Advertising Credibility: Conceptualizing and Measuring CEO Brand Image
A brand’s success lies not only in its corporate image and reputation, but also in the relationship between its leadership and consumers. Especially on social media, it’s not just about familiarity with the CEO, but a CEO’s brand image—the associations consumers make between the brand and a chief executive—that predicts how credible its advertising appears. Such were the key findings in this research by Daniela Andreini (University of Bergamo, Italy), Marc Fetscherin (Rollins College, Florida) and Lia Zarantonello (University of Roehampton, U.K.).

The research team broke down a CEO’s brand image into a multidimensional construct. Drawing from earlier, proven theoretical frameworks, they gave the construct three dimensions—personality, performance and leadership. From there, they developed a reliable nine-item scale to capture these dimensions and quantify them. The study concludes that CEO brand image is completely independent from corporate brand image, corporate brand reputation, product brand awareness and even CEO familiarity. Instead, a CEO’s brand image is a predictor of how credible their company’s advertisements, including social media advertisements, are. As a result, it is paramount for a CEO to manage his or her brand image carefully, particularly on social media.

For advertising and public relations agencies, the nine-item scale has specific benefits, including:

• It can help predict advertisements’ credibility by considering the CEO brand image, especially in social-media contexts.
• It can be used as an integral part of existing corporate, communication and brand-tracking studies, to assess external audiences’ perceptions of CEOs’ personality, performance and leadership.

 

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