CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENT

Celebrity endorsement

Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to extend previous research into sport celebrity endorsements by investigating such endorsements of products ultimately sold by retailers. This is done by updating previous research involving print media in sporting magazines.

Design/methodology/approach - A content analysis approach is used, examining advertisements in randomly selected issues of sports illustrated from the most recent full six years of publication.

Findings - Changes in the frequency of advertisements using sports celebrities were found compared to previous studies. Additionally, it appears that products which are ultimately sold by retailers are endorsed more frequently by celebrities in certain sports than others.

Originality/value - By including in the investigation the topics of sport played and consumer products, the paper extends the current literature to explore the advertisers' use of athlete endorsers with products directly and indirectly impacting retailers.

Chapter One: Introduction

Celebrity endorsement

Celebrity endorsement has been defined as:

Any individual who enjoys public recognition and who uses this recognition on behalf of a consumer good by appearing with it in an advertisement (McCracken, 1989).

A consistent theme emerging in advertising models is that both cognitive and behavioural responses under low-involvement situations can be facilitated by source cues that the consumer identifies with. Celebrity endorsement has become one of the communication strategies employed by marketers in an attempt to build a congruent image between the brand and the consumer. Endorsers can be of many types, including the typical consumer, e.g. the use of Prunella Scales (best known as Sybil Fawlty in the Fawlty Towers series) by Tesco, the product class expert, the company president, and the celebrity. There is great value attached to companies using a created spokesperson for endorsement, as the company has greater control of its image:

The company can build characters that are congruent with their brands and target audiences. Companies have very little control over the celebrity's persona, as this has been created over the years (Tom et al., 1992).

Celebrity endorsers have been found to produce more positive responses towards advertising and greater purchase intentions than a non-celebrity endorser (Atkin and Block, 1983; Petty and Cacioppo, 1983). Other studies have measured the impact celebrity endorsers have on a firm's profitability finding them to be effective. Furthermore McCracken (1989) found that celebrity endorsers represented an effective way of transferring meanings to brands:

Used in this way, the role of the celebrity endorser transcends that of simply being an executional device which might be most appropriate under low-involvement situations and becomes a powerful tool for managing brand equity (Petty and Cacioppo, 1983).

From a theoretical perspective, therefore, celebrities are effective endorsers because of their symbolic aspirational reference group associations (Soloman and Assael, 1987).

The use of aspirational groups is also a feature of celebrity endorsement in other sectors. Sports personalities have been used to endorse sports manufacturers' products, e.g. David Beckham's endorsement of Adidas. In order to understand how these celebrity endorsers are able to transfer their personality to products it is important to understand what attitudes an endorser must exhibit in order to ...