Co-creators Endorsing their Winning Product Idea in Ads: Dealing with Brand Audiences’ Skepticism: An Abstract

Abstract

Brand communication practices relying on ordinary consumers—that is, peer endorsers—is getting increasingly popular (Kapitan and Silvera 2016). Advertising campaigns for new products resulting from consumer empowerment strategies (CES) often include the CES winner’s endorsement. For instance, the winning consumer-creator of new Oreo “Cherry Cola” was pictured in the product launch campaign, including additional descriptions and stories about her. Little is known about the effectiveness factors of peer endorsement though and more research is needed. Attractiveness is acknowledged to be influential in a celebrity endorsement context (e.g., Knoll and Matthes 2017). Instead, in a CES context, it might be reasonable to think that consumers expect to see peer endorsers looking “like themselves,” by virtue of their social user identity (Dahl et al. 2014). This research examines whether attractiveness also prevails in a peer endorsement context, that is, CES-related advertisements.