Social Media Influencers and Consumer Online Engagement Management

Celebrity Endorsement

The use of celebrities as endorsers has been a common but expensive practice in the advertising industry since the nineteenth centuries (Choi, Lee, & Kim, 2005). It is suggested that attributes acquired by celebrities, such as trustworthiness, likeability, expertness, dynamism, and objectivity are essential for drawing attention, enhance source credibility, and increase the likelihood of message recall (Ohanian, 1990). Source credibility model (Sternthal, Dholakia, & Leavitt, 1978) and source attractiveness model (McGuire, 1969) are widely used by researchers in celebrity endorsement literature to assess the effectiveness of messages conveyed through celebrity endorsement (McCracken, 1989). Additionally, “match-up hypothesis” is another stream of research on this topic to examine the congruence between a celebrity and the endorsed product (Kahle & Homer, 1985; Solomon, Ashmore, & Longo, 1992). Nevertheless, there are still several disadvantages or pitfalls in utilising celebrity endorsements. For instance, celebrities are costly to be hired as endorsers and sometimes they might overshadow the endorsed products (Erdogan, 1999). Also, results from (Mehta, 1994) study show that there were no statistically significant differences in consumers’ attitudes towards brand and purchase intentions stimulated by celebrity endorsers and other type of endorsers.