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Choosing the Right Celebrity Endorser
Summary
How do you make the right decision on a celebrity endorser for your services industry brand? A new framework assessed an endorser’s expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness as predictors of brand credibility and purchase intention for the airline industry. It found that:
- Different factors affected high-involvement customers than low-involvement ones
- “Regardless of involvement, airline consumers’ perception of a celebrity endorser’s attractiveness and trustworthiness” boosted “attitude and perception of credibility toward the endorsed brand,” which led to purchase intent.
This learning may lead to new approaches in determining what celebrities fit best with a brand.
A lot of research attempts to explain what makes an effective celebrity endorser for a brand and the benefits of endorsements. However, prior studies have fallen short in identifying what shapes customer perceptions of brand credibility via celebrity endorsement, particularly for the services industries, according to Stephen Wang, Professor of Marketing at National Taiwan Ocean University, and Angeline Close Scheinbaum, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Their new study, which sought to fill in the blanks, focused on airlines, given the dearth of knowledge on services industries on this topic and airlines’ international scope.
STEPHEN W. WANG is professor of marketing at the Department of Shipping and Transportation Management, College of Maritime Science and Management, National Taiwan Ocean University. He develops and tests theory-based models of customer relationship management (CRM), celebrity endorsement, and consumer behavior in the airline, shipping, and logistics sectors. His research stream is grounded in a profound interest in explaining and predicting linkages among CRM, brand, consumer attitude, affect, cognition, behavioral intent, and consumer behavior. He has published in, among others, the Journal of Air Transport Management, the Services Industries Journal, Journal of Service Theory and Practice, Current Issues in Tourism, Computers and Human Behavior, and International
Journal of Banking Marketing, among others.
ANGELINE CLOSE SCHEINBAUM is associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin at the Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations. Her research explains and predicts links among consumer attitude, affect, cognition, behavioral intent, and consumer behavior. Close Scheinbaum’s work is published in the the Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Advertising, and European Journal of Marketing, among others. She is coauthor of Advertising & Integrated Brand Promotion (Cengage, 2017), an advertising textbook focused on branding.