Role of Incongruent Product Endorsement on the Celebrity Image

Abstract

Celebrity endorsing products for promotion is a popular advertising strategy. As the cost of getting a celebrity for promotion is substantially high, selecting the right celebrity is of great concern to advertisers. Extant literature generally indicates numerous benefits from employing celebrity endorsement and has proposed quite a few mechanisms to explain the effectiveness of the celebrity endorsement. In spite of a great deal of research that has tried to theorize the celebrity endorsement process, little is known about the criteria for choosing the right celebrity to endorse a particular product. A right celebrity endorser enhances the attitude towards the advertisements and endorsed products, but an incorrect endorser may have a negative impact. Not only the consumers' attitude towards the advertisement and the endorsed product may go down, it may also impact the celebrity endorser too. The purpose of this study is to explore whether the celebrity endorser's image gets affected by the incongruence of the endorsed product. The study was carried out to examine the celebrity image dimension in the Indian context and celebrity/product mismatch effects. In the study a survey was done on the existing celebrity image scale to see its suitability in Indian context. Further the scale was used in the experiment where different level of incongruence was tested on male and female celebrity from movies and sports to examine the celebrity/ product incongruence effects. Results showed there is an effect of incongruent advertisement on the celebrities' image but not all celebrities are affected similarly. Different celebrities are treated differently by the consumers. Some celebrities actually get positively affected while some get affected negatively. The theory of cognitive dissonance has been used to explain this behavior. The interaction of the gender of the respondents with the gender of the celebrity was also found to be significant.