Marketers use celebrity endorsements to make advertisements believable and to enhance consumer recognition of the brand name. However, once a direct link has been formed from a celebrity to a brand, the negative information about the celebrity may reflect on to the endorsed brand. Applying the S-O-R model and the balance theory, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of celebrity-brand congruence and publicity on consumers’ attitudes toward the celebrity and brand as well as their buying intention. A survey of a 2 (congruence vs. incongruence) × 2 (positive vs. negative publicity) experimental design was conducted for this study. A total of 120 female Millennial consumers answered the survey and 105 surveys with usable data were collected. The mean age of the participants was 24 years old (SD = 3.28). Results found that the celebrity-brand congruence and publicity play a significant role in consumer behavior related to attitudes toward the celebrity and brand/product, as well as buying intention. Thus, retail marketers need to allocate more investigation into celebrity endorsements that match with brand image that can lead to long-term, positive partnerships.

PurposeOn a home game weekend of collegiate football, thousands of fan visitors spend their weekend participating in college football games, showing significant potential of sports tourism businesses in the USA. Understanding the original personality of sport tourists and their travel motivation factors is imperative to develop appealing tourist attractions at the destinations of sports team fandoms. The purpose of the study is to examine the relationships among tourists' personality characteristics, their push and pulls motivations, satisfaction with travel experience, and loyalty toward destination and team using structural equation modeling.Design/methodology/approachThe author collected information from a total of 301 sports tourists who had traveled to a college football game within the past year, staying at least one night in a hotel or other lodging place. This study employed PASW Statistics 25.0 and structural equation modeling using LISREL 9.30 for data analyses.FindingsPersonality has a significant relationship with push factors, especially for socialization motivation, and pull factors (i.e. access and affordability, other attractions) had more significant effects on sports tourists' satisfaction than push factors. The findings indicate the key roles for the entertainment motivation in generating tourists' satisfaction and destination loyalty and important roles of destination loyalty in building team loyalty.Originality/valueThe present study provides an approach of sports tourists' travel behaviors and experiences in the sporting event tourism. The outcome of this research can help both sports event organizers and destination marketers to understand the motivations for sports game attendance and to develop marketing strategies and products/services for attracting various types of sports tourists to games.

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