To Use the Obvious Choice: Investigating the Relative Effectiveness of an Overexposed Celebrity

The practice of using celebrity endorsements in advertising to promote products dates back to more than a hundred years. According to McCracken (1989), a celebrity endorser could be defined as, . any individual who enjoys public recognition and who uses this on behalf of a consumer good by appearing with it in an advertisement (p. 310). Recent research on celebrity endorsement suggests that the percentage of celebrity advertisements out of the total number of ads aired is as high as 25-30% in western countries (Shimp 2000) and around 60% in India (Shashidhar 2008). With this in mind, it's not surprising that the celebrity endorsement phenomenon has attracted increasing attention from practitioners and academics over the last three decades. In India however, multiple endorsements by celebrities is a common phenomenon (Patro and Dutta 2010). The popular celebrities may get more than 10 brand endorsements in a single year and this trend is common across Asian countries like India (Shashidhar 2008) and China (Hung et al. 2011). As an example, Indian cricketer M.S. Dhoni has more than 25 brand endorsements while actor Shah Rukh Khan has 21. At the same time there are celebrities with fewer endorsements such as actor John Abraham (such Clinic Shampoo and Garnier) and chess grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand (such as NIIT and AMD). The obvious implication would be that a celebrity with more number of endorsements (The term overexposed celebrity is used in the paper for a celebrity with a high number of product endorsements), would be in demand and would charge a higher fee than a celebrity with lesser number of endorsements. However, the question which could be asked is whether the overexposed celebrity would generate a more favorable impact on the consumers. In this regard, early research (Tripp et al. 1994) suggested that multiple endorsements by a celebrity would have a negative impact on the consumers' perception of the celebrity credibility and would adversely affect attitude toward the advertisement. More recently, Ilicic and Webster (2011) have supported similar views when they found multiple endorsements by a celebrity to negatively affect consumer attitudes. In such a scenario, it would be interesting to investigate whether an overexposed celebrity would have a differential impact on consumer attitudes in the Indian context than an underexposed one. Moreover, a well researched phenomenon in celebrity endorsements suggests that celebrity product congruence is important for achieving positive consumer attitudes in the context of celebrity endorsements (Friedman and Friedman 1979; Kamins and Gupta 1994; Mittelstaedt et al. 2000). The present study investigated the relative effectiveness of an overexposed celebrity vis-a-vis the same for an underexposed celebrity in presence of Celebrity-product congruence/incongruence. The study also explored the possible reasons behind the observations gained from the former objectives.Based on the literature review, four hypotheses were developed initially to test a) the relative effectiveness of an overexposed celebrity vis-a-vis an underexposed one in presence of congruent/incongruent product conditions; b) the effect of celebrity-product congruence on consumer attitudes; c) the relative effectiveness of an overexposed celebrity vis-a-vis an underexposed one when both endorse the same product. The study was further augmented on the basis of findings from the first three phases of the study into investigating the reasons behind the perceived ineffectiveness of the overexposed celebrity to generate significantly different outcomes in consumer attitudes than an underexposed celebrity. …