When brands use CEOs and employees as spokespersons

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to clarify the persuasion mechanism of chief executive officers (CEOs) and employees as endorsers of brand advertising and helps discern consumer attitudes toward internal endorsement. Design/methodology/approach The exploratory character of the present research required a qualitative approach combining focus groups and face-to-face interviews considered as both meaningful and complementary. Findings The findings suggest that while the celebrity endorsement ensures familiarity and likability, internal endorsement supports credibility and congruity with an important role of storytelling. Moreover, employee endorsements induce an internalization process based on the real-self, while the endorser CEO induces admiration grounded in the ideal self. More fundamentally, the study reveals how the internal endorsement modifies the meaning transfer model and involves a process of meaning translation, which affects the corporate brand image rather than the product brand image. Originality/value The present paper reveals that CEOs and employees can be strong levers for gilding the corporate brand image compared to the celebrities who enhance the product brand image. Moreover, the authors show that the CEO is a character who can be admired without the threat of upward comparison at the opposite of celebrities. Finally, this research highlights the specific role of employees bringing authenticity because of their anchorage in real life.

Building a Personal Brand as a CEO: A Case Study of Vivy Yusof, the Cofounder of FashionValet and the dUCk Group

“…Therefore, CEOs need to focus on strengthening their personality posts when engaging with online users. Although many studies have found that CEOs can leverage branding to act as effective spokespersons and provide endorsement for company and product brands in commercial marketing activities (Agnihotri & Bhattacharya, 2019; Bai et al, 2019; Ferns et al, 2008; Zeitoun et al, 2020), in practice there is less engagement in terms of likes for content related to company and brand appearance in presence posts. One explanation may be that online users prefer to learn more about a CEO’s personal life and social relationships rather than company- and product-related information.…”

Social perception of brands: Warmth and competence define images of both brands and social groups

“…In qualitative interviews, admired brands exhibit traits of warmth and competence traceable to employee and management behavior. Along the same line, companies that use their own employees or CEO as spokespersons in their advertising enjoy more credibility, authenticity, and congruity with their storytelling (Zeitoun et al, 2020). Blending social perception and brand perception even further, a famous person can be both a social being and a brand, bringing closer together the notion of social perception and brand perception.…”

“…However, two alternative interpretations were also mentioned in the review. One is that brand perception is social because consumers think about the people behind the brand such as the CEO (Centeno et al, 2019; Zeitoun et al, 2020) or employees (Leung et al, 2020; Zeitoun et al, 2020). The second is that consumers used their stereotypes about typical brand consumers to apply it to the brand (Aagerup, 2020; Antonetti & Maklan, 2016).…”

“…As noted, high self-brand congruence leads to positive brand relational outcomes (He et al, 2018;Lee et al, 2013;Park et al, 2013;Wijnands & Gill, 2020), and some people can become human brands (Bennett et al, 2019;Centeno et al, 2019;Thomson, 2006;Zeitoun et al, 2020). Combining these two ideas, research studied the way consumers relate to influencers.…”

Celebrity CEOs’ credibility, image of their brands and consumer materialism

“…In past research, the role and impact of CEOs were studied through their effectiveness in advertisements (Agnihotri and Bhattacharya, 2019), their pay ratio compared to their workers (Mohan et al, 2018), their endorsement strategy (Vaid and Ahearne, 2018), their marketing background and market orientation (Brower and Nath, 2018), their appearance and gender (Dean, 2019), their media appearances (Bai et al, 2019), their role as a spokesperson (Zeitoun et al, 2020) and as a dimension of brand association (Andreini et al, 2021), but without considering CEOs as celebrities, with the exception of Scheidt et al's (2018) study. However, more and more press releases treat some CEOs as such, providing details of their personal life and public behavior.…”