SELF-ENDORSING VERSUS OTHER-ENDORSING IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS The Effect on Brand Attitude and Purchase Intention

Self-endorsing—the portrayal of potential consumers using products—is a novel advertising strategy made possible by the development of virtual environments. Three experiments compared self-endorsing to endorsing by an unfamiliar other. In Experiment 1, self-endorsing in online advertisements led to higher brand attitude and purchase intention than other-endorsing. Moreover, photographs were a more effective persuasion channel than text. In Experiment 2, participants wore a brand of clothing in a high-immersive virtual environment and preferred the brand worn by their virtual self to the brand worn by others. Experiment 3 demonstrated that an additional mechanism behind self-endorsing was the interactivity of the virtual representation. Evidence for self-referencing as a mediator is presented. 94 The Journal of Advertising context, consumers can experience presence while interacting with three-dimensional products on Web sites (Biocca et al. 2001; Edwards and Gangadharbatla 2001; Li, Daugherty, and Biocca 2001). When users feel a heightened sense of presence and perceive the virtual experience to be real, they are more easily persuaded by the advertisement (Kim and Biocca 1997). The differing degree, or the objectively measurable property of presence, is called immersion. Immersion is the extent to which media are capable of delivering a vivid illusion of reality using rich layers of sensory input (Slater and Wilbur 1997). Therefore, different levels of immersion (objective unit) lead to different experiences of presence (subjective unit), and both concepts are closely related to interactivity. Web sites are considered to be low-immersive virtual environments because of limited interactive capacity and lack of richness in sensory input, which decreases the sense of presence, whereas virtual reality is considered a high-immersive virtual environment because of its ability to reproduce perceptual richness, which heightens the sense of feeling that the virtual experience is real. Another differentiating aspect of virtual environments is that they offer plasticity of the appearance and behavior of virtual self-representations. It is well known that virtual selves may or may not be true replications of physical appearances (Farid 2009; Yee and Bailenson 2006), but users can also be faced with situations in which they are not controlling the behaviors of their own virtual representations (Fox and Bailenson 2009). In other words, a user can see himor herself using (and perhaps enjoying) a product he or she has never physically used. Based on these unique features of virtual platforms, the current study aims to explore the effect of viewing a virtual representation that may or may not look like the self, endorsing a brand by use. We also manipulate the interactivity of endorsers within virtual environments to provide evidence for the mechanism behind self-endorsing. THE SELF-ENDORSED ADVERTISEMENT Recent studies have confirmed that positive connections between the self and brands can be created by subtle manipulations, such as mimicry of the self ’s nonverbal behaviors (Tanner et al. 2008). The slightest affiliation between the self and the other can lead to positive brand evaluations. In a study by Ferraro, Bettman, and Chartrand (2009), an unfamiliar ingroup or out-group member was portrayed in a photograph with a water bottle bearing a brand name. The simple detail of the person wearing a baseball cap with the same school logo (i.e., in-group affiliation) triggered participants to choose the brand associated with the in-group member. Thus, the self–brand relationship significantly influences brand attitude, but self-endorsing has not received scientific attention to date, arguably because it was not easy to implement before the onset of virtual environments. Prior research has studied the effectiveness of different types of endorsers and their influence on the persuasiveness of advertisements (Friedman and Friedman 1979; Stafford, Stafford, and Day 2002), but the self was not considered in these investigations as a possible source of endorsement. However, there is the possibility that the currently sporadic use of self-endorsing (e.g., www.myvirtualmodel.com) will increase dramatically. For instance, personalized recommendations are being sent to consumers based on online “footsteps” of prior purchases (Tam and Ho 2006). Furthermore, Google has spearheaded keyword search advertising, which displays text advertisements in real-time based on search words ( Jansen, Hudson, and Hunter 2008), and Yahoo has begun to display video and image advertisements based on search words (Clifford 2009). Considering the availability of personal images on the Web due to the widespread employment of social networking sites, the idea of self-endorsing may spread quickly. An advertiser could replace the endorser shown in the image advertisement called by search words with the user to create a self-endorsed advertisement. Thus, the timely investigation of the influence of self-endorsing on users, as well as its mechanism, is imperative. Based on positivity biases related to the self (Baumeister 1998; Chambers and Windschitl 2004), self-endorsing may be a powerful persuasion tool. However, there may be instances when using the self in an advertisement may not be effective, such as when the virtual representation does not look like the consumer and the consumer fails to identify with the representation. Self-endorsed advertisements may also lose persuasiveness when movements of the representation are not synched with the actions of the consumer. Another type of endorser that researchers are increasingly focusing on is the typical user endorser. Typical endorsers have an advantage in that they appeal to the similarity of product usage with the average user. For instance, highly attractive models are not always effective compared with normally attractive models, even for beauty-enhancing products (i.e., acne treatment), when users perceive that the highly attractive models do not need those products (Bower and Landreth 2001). Moreover, with the advancement of the Internet, typical endorsers are becoming more influential via online testimonials (Lee, Park, and Han 2006; Wang 2005). In the current studies, we compared the influence of typical endorsers (i.e., other-endorsing) and self-endorsers on brand attitude and purchase intentions. In addition to investigating the effects of self-endorsing, this work extends results of earlier studies on the effectiveness of different types of endorsers and makes important theoretical contributions by studying self-referencing as an underlying mechanism of self-endorsing.