Abstract
Celebrities act as a credible communication source for many marketing and community-related communications. Community commitment for brands has been researched across the countries. Commitment of communities is an important matter for brands to meet desired responses within community-based brand building programs. Community commitment within disaster management is one of the national level priorities in many countries including emerging economies in Asia. Celebrities are used as a credible source to educate and motivate communities to get aware or actively participate in disaster management activities. This paper employed a quantitative survey method aiming the communities who actively engaged with disaster management programs sponsored or endorsed by celebrities in Sri Lanka, a country extendedly applies community-based disaster management strategies. Hypotheses were formed on how celebrity credibility influences brand community commitment to engage with disaster management activities whilst mediating effect of brand community trust is also hypothesized. A size of 230 sample was contacted for the survey. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was executed testing the hypotheses by using AMOS 20 software. Results verified celebrity credibility influences brand community commitment. Analysis proved brand commitment trust acts as a mediator on the effect made by celebrity credibility on brand community commitment within disaster management programs.
Highlights
Brand community is a term found in the domain of marketing that usually reveals how brand and stakeholders interact for long term relationships
It reports that suburban segment as the large representation of the sample (58%) compared to rural and urban categories. It indicates more than 80% of respondents had been exposed to disaster management programs induced by celebrities via electronic media campaigns compared to social media and print media tools
This paper attempts to reveal how far celebrity credibility attributed by trustworthiness, expertise and attractiveness (Ohanion, 1991; Hung, 2014; Dissanayake & Ismail, 2015) could influence communities to effectively participate in disaster management programs
Summary
Brand community is a term found in the domain of marketing that usually reveals how brand and stakeholders interact for long term relationships. In the views of empirical evidences, brand community is identified as a community or group of people attributed by specialized geographically limited cluster showing social relationships admiring a particular brand (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001). According to marketing related literature, brand community is claimed as a group of people who hold a strong interest towards a brand committing active deeds both in offline and online scopes (Jeppesen and Frederiksen, 2006). Some studies mainly highlight the benefits of brand community as creating loyalty, positive word of mouth and favorable behavior towards the brand or organization (Jeppesen & Frederiksen, 2006; & Stokburger-Sauer, 2010). According to Kang,Lee,Lee & Choi (2007), new communication options including social media had resulted extended impacts of brand communities including creating ijbm.ccsenet.org
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