When Sports Celebrity Doesn'T Perfrom: How Consumers React to Celebrity Endorsement?

Abstract

Ubiquity of celebrity endorsements has attracted all around attention to make it more effective. This has emerged over the period as a prevalent form of advertising. Majority of celebrities made part and parcel of advertisements are either from cinema and or are the sportspersons. Youths imitate them after coming to know their lifestyles through such advertisements which portray fabulous and thrilling lifestyle of celebrities. They wonder, get fascinated and always think of emulating them. As role models, celebrities are capable to influence many facets of consumer behaviour. By virtue of magnitude and range of their impact on the consumer behaviour, these celebrities are used for multitude of marketing activities which include image building, attention grabbing, persuasion etc. Billions of dollars are committed and spent on such activities. In real life, the performance of sports celebrities may go through good and bad patches. Despite ample research on the impact of negative information concerning celebrity endorsers on consumers, little is known about the impact of poor performance of sports celebrities on the field, on consumers. The present study assesses the impact of poor performance of cricket celebrities on the perception of consumers towards them as a role model through using a pre and post quasi-experimental research design. Additionally, it also gauges the impact of poor performance on behavioural intentions of consumers. The results indicate that the poor performance of sports celebrities on field may dent their standing as a role model but fail to display significant impact of the behavioural intentions. The paper includes the implications for researchers and managers.