Celebrity Endorsements and Brand Personality

Abstract

Celebrity endorsement is a highly researched field in marketing. Having its roots in psychology and the source credibility of communication (Hovland and Weiss, 1952; McCroskey and Young, 1981) it has come up a long way since the early research was done in the seventies (Friedman, et aI., 1976; Kamen et aI., 1975). Researchers have delved into various issues of celebrity endorsements such as source credibility of the celebrity, celebrity-brand congruence and meaning transfer model (McCracken, 1989). Research in Brand Personality is relatively new. The works of Aaker and Fournier (1995), Aaker (1997) and Ourgee (1998) initiated the interest which ultimately resulted in the construction of a Brand Personality Scale by Aaker (1997). However, researchers have not looked into the issue of Celebrity Personality affecting the Brand Personality even in congruence studies. In this paper we try to address the issue of celebrity personality affecting brand personality. Based on an empirical study, we try to find out whether the same personality dimensions exist for the celebrity and the brand endorsed respectively. Following which we have tried to see whether celebrity personality has an effect of brand personality. The study is supposed to generate research interest because of its novelty of idea.