How To Choose The Right Celebrity Endorser: Literature Review, Hypothesis, And AHP Decision Model

Problem Description

How to choose right celebrity to be endorser?

We know good celebrity can be a right celebrity endorser who can bring good organization performance, improve the reputation of the business and get lot of loyalty customers. They help the organization to be benefitted more. However, in case of choosing wrong celebrity, the organizations can face lose in their business.  For instance, in this year’s Super Bowl, Laurence Fishburne boosts the purchase intention of the consumers for Kia’s 900 Model. Besides, in the last year, Willem Dafoe, User and Kate Upton have successfully increased the sales of new Mercedes CLA. However, it has been found that some celebrities failed to increase the product sales. For example, John Stamos could not attract that much customers to purchase Oikos yogurt. Stephen Colbert and Psy are the celebrities who failed to enhance the sales of Pistachios. In the year of 2014, Kaley Cuoco could not play an effective role in attracting the customers for Toyota (Smith, 2014). This particular research will discuss it further.

Literature Review

Celebrity effect is a typical case of “halo effect”. —-Celebrity’s attractive nature

The concepts of marketing and psychology are much close to each other. Psychology can be defined as “systematic study of human behavior,” and marketing can be defined “systematic study of human behavior in the marketplace” (Ries, 2006). There is a psychology term called “Halo Effect” as well as a marketing term that is used in business. Thorndike (1920) stated that “Rating was apparently affected by a marked tendency to think of the person in general as rather good or rather inferior and to color the judgments of the qualities by the general feeling.” (lachman & Bass,1985). As stated by Glover (2009), a study report has identified that 60% women and 35% men are interested and pay more attention to the advertisements when a celebrity appears in the advertisement. It has been found that a large number of percentages of customers tend to be affected by the product when a celebrity promotes it. Customers pay much attention to these particular advertisements and they are also well aware of the product name and brand that the celebrities promote (Yeo & Lim 2015). Why celebrity attracts customers? And even celebrity can change customers’ behavior. Here is a reason that most of the celebrities are good-looking people and assumed as more famous, more intelligent as well as more successful. That is considered as halo effect in the psychology context (Ries, 2006).

Literature Review

Brand image

On the basis of Dimed and Joulyana (2005), it has been shown that customers are positively affected by the celebrities and attracted towards specific brands and thus customers’ purchase intention is increased. It has been found that when a celebrity appears in an advertisement, they can affect the customers’ purchase decision more, in comparison to the non-celebrity endorsers. Brand image is the thoughts and feelings of the consumers about particular product (Roy & Banerjee, 2007). As stated by Hsieh & Li (2008), strong brand image creates effective brand messages of a particular product over the brands of the competitors. Consequently, customers’ behavior will be influenced and determined by the brand image (Burmann et al., 2008).

Trustworthiness

In order to promoting brand, an organization builds several marketing strategies and brand credibility that helps to convey the product information to the customers (Erdem and Swait, 1998). Endorsement is an effective communication tool that comprises the signal of endorsed brands. It is assumed that the credibility of the endorser transfers into the products brands. It can be stated in a more specific way along with some examples. Wallace Huo who is a Chinese movie star, is engaged in promoting environmental causes. Thus, he is perceived as a trustworthy person in China. Moreover, Wallance endorsed the luxury products of SK-II, and as a result, consumers’ credibility perceptions towards the skin care products of this particular brand became positive. Therefore, it can be said that high endorser credibility leads to higher brand credibility. Brand investment can be addressed as an effective indicator of brand credibility. It is assumed that the firms that made large investments would deliver promised products to the customers (Erdem and Swait, 1998). Therefore, the firms make large investment by involving celebrity endorsement. Depending on the discussion, the hypotheses are made.

Fitness

As per the statement of Wei and Lu (2013), through consistently keeping the brand endorser with the endorsed brand and product, the organization can increase the motive of the customers to purchase the products. According to Fink, Parker, Cunningham and Cuneen (2012), the endorsed celebrity and the products have to fit accurately as well as appropriately with each other. Boyd and Shank (2004) stated in this context that the perfect match up of celebrity and the products can highly rate the product quality. Thus, the study has brought out that the matchup between endorser and the endorsed products has a significant link with the customers’ buying decision.

Hypothesis

Based on the review of the literature above, the following hypotheses are proposed:

H1: Celebrities can positively influence customer purchase intention and attract more customers

H2: Celebrities have a positive influence on attitude toward the brand images

H3: Celebrities have a positive influence on attitude toward the trustworthiness

H4: Credibility is fit with the brand

There are four types of celebrities I will mention in this proposal: Movie star, Singer, athlete, and model.

As I mentioned before, I will pick SK-II skincare product as the target to finish this research plan.

 I will use primary quantitative research method, survey by using questionnaire, to obtain information to find solutions of our hypothesis. The responses of the questionnaire were collected from over 50 consumers around us, who were picked randomly.

Q1. What type of celebrities does you like the most? (Movie star, Singer, athlete, and model.)

Q2. If these four types of celebrities appointed as endorser respectively, would you like to purchase this products? (Attractive)

Q3. If these four types of celebrities appointed as endorser respectively, what do you think about this product? (Brand image)

Q4. If these four types of celebrities appointed as endorser respectively, would you support this product all the time? (Trustworthiness)

Q5. If this four types celebrities to be endorser respectively, do you think is this a good decision? (Fitness)

Use of AHP decision model

After questionnaire, I will get the primary data, then use these useful data based on AHP decision model to make a decision. 

This proposal is planning to make a decision which type of celebrity that organization should choose and I target on the movie star, singer, athlete, and model. (Noted A, B, C, D) and then I focus on four criteria: attractive, brand image, trustworthiness and fitness. Our comparisons are summarized as below; using the data we have collected and apply in Excel.

Skipping the Process; Final AHP Scoring Model should be like this:

	Alternative				Criterion
	Movie star	Singer	Athlete	Model	Weights
	A	B	C	D
Attractive
Brand image
Trustworthiness
Fitness

Table 1: AHP Scoring Model

(Source: Created by Author)

Previous research has applied sources to explain the influence of celebrity endorser in customer behavior. However, it rarely to see how to choose appropriate celebrity based on analysis the influence of celebrity endorser via AHP decision model. By making up for this gap in research, I hope this proposal will successfully help different organization to choose right celebrity. It should be emphasized that different organization may has different situation, each organization focuses on different criteria combine with self-situation.

Reference List

Ries, A. (2006). Understanding Marketing Psychology and the Halo Effect.

https://adage.com/article/al-ries/understanding-marketing-psychology-halo-effect/108676/

Burmann, C., Schaefer, K., & Maloney, P. (2008). Industry image: Its impact on the brand image of potential employees. Journal of Brand Management, 16(3), 159-176. https://dx.doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.bm.2550112

Dimed, C. & Joulyana, S. (2005). Celebrity endorsement –hidden factors to success. Internationella Handelshogskolan.

Erdem, T. & Swait, J. (1998). “Brand equity as a signalling phenomenon”, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Vol. 7 No. 2, pp. 131-57.

Glover, P. (2009). Celebrity endorsement in tourism advertising: Effects on destination image. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, vol. 16, pp. 16–23.

Smith, J. (2014) https://www.ama.org/publications/eNewsletters/MarketingInsightsNewsletter/Pages/famous-faces-questionable-results-celebrities-in-advertising.aspx#sthash.6lHCxjjK.dpuf

Thorndike, E.L. (1920). A constant error in psychological rating, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 4,25-29.

Lachman, S. J., & Bass, A. R. (1985). A Direct Study of Halo Effect. Journal Of Psychology, 119(6), 535.

Methaq, A .S (2016). The Impact of Brand Image and Corporate Branding on Consumer’s Choice: The Role of Brand Equity. International Journal of Marketing Studies; Vol. 8, No. 1;

Mazzini. M & Rosidah.M(2013) . Celebrity Entrepreneur Endorsement and Advertising Effectiveness. Social and Behavioral Sciences 130 ( 2014 ) 11 – 20

Roy, D., & Banerjee, S. (2007). Caring strategy for integration of brand identity with brand image. International Journal of Commerce and Management, 17(1/2), 140-148. https://dx.doi.org/10.1108/10569210710776512

Spry, A., Pappu, R. & Cornwell, T.B. (2009). European Journal of Marketing

Vol. 45 No. 6, 2011

Wei, K. K. and Li, W. Y. (2013). Measuring the impact of celebrity endorsement on consumer behavioural intentions: a study of Malaysian consumers. International Journal of Sports Marketing & Sponsorship, pp. 157-177.

Yeo, S.F. &lim, K.B. (2015). The Effect of Celebrity Endorser Towards Customer Purchase Intention.  Advanced Science Letters. Vol. 21, 2164-216.