Celebrity Credibility Influence on Cosmetic Product Purchase Intention: The Moderating Role of Ethnocentrism

Introduction

Due to market globalization, more firms worldwide small or big, embrace international marketing as a business expansion approach that is achievable. There has been an overabundance of goods and services foreign or locally produced, available in the market. One of the industries is the cosmetic industry which has been growing and expanding around the world in both developing and developed countries. This phenomenon opens the doors for those interested in the business to promote their cosmetic products, the continued growth and evolution of the cosmetic industry offer good opportunities (Ministry of Health, Malaysia, 2009). According to the U.S. Commercial Service (2014), Asia Pacific market value has increased to further than US$ 70billion, which makes it as the second highest after the Western European market. Asian cosmetics industry has become one of the fastest emerging markets.

Consumers’ interest in cosmetics has been affected by heavy marketing, advertisements, and the growing affluence which increased their attraction to high-quality brands. According to the U.S. Commercial Service (2014), Malaysia’s market for cosmetics and toiletries has a growth rate of 13% per year. In Malaysia, there are more than 60,000 kinds of cosmetics available in the local market (Ministry of Health, Malaysia, 2009). A global study found that TV advertising featuring celebrities is typically used in each country, even though there are great differences in preference between countries (Praet, 2001). Lately, the number of celebrities promoting the brand through different online environments is increasing (Wood & Burkhalter, 2014). According to Praet (2001), celebrity endorsement is noticeably more common in Asian countries than in Europe and United States (US). This was proved by a comparison of 6, 359 TV advertisements carried out cross-national from 25 countries, which the results showed that celebrity endorsements were used in the advertisements in Asia which was in South Korea and China, ranged from 61% to 25% respectively, while in European countries endorsers were used in less than 15% of advertisements.

In order to stand out of the chaos and give a matchless and important position in the minds of consumers, some companies enter deals with celebrities (Temperley & Tangen, 2006). These companies then hire these celebrities as endorsers or spokespersons to publicize and market the company’s ideas, products, or services. In modern marketing, celebrity endorsement has become chart-topping (Choi & Rifon, 2007; McCracken, 1989). Moreover, according to O’Mahony and Meenaghan (1997), marketers believe that celebrities would be able to attract the attention of consumers towards the endorsed products and could transmit their image values to the product involved by virtue of their celebrity profile and engaging attributes therefore, marketers would invest high amount of asset to align the products with the well-known celebrities. Celebrity endorsements enjoy enduring fame as a way to improve marketing communications (Bergkvist & Zhou, 2016).