Reasons For Using Celebrity Endorsers

One of the biggest challenges in marketing communications is how to break through ever-increasing  media clutter. Celebrity endorsements of messages can help meet this challenge due to the characteristics they offer.

As pointed out by a top-level practitioner, every time ads appear in TV or press they interrupt a programme or an article. Therefore, they are an intrusion; and very few people positively welcome ads, though many do not reject them. People see ads as part of their normal life. They may be prepared to remain watching during the commercial break, instead of putting the kettle on , but an advertiser's message still has to stand out from the crowd. Celebrity endorsement can potentially make this happen [1].

However, some practitioners are quite sceptical about ad agency motivations for using celebrities. They argue that agencies bring in a celebrity when they are desperate for an idea, or everything else fails. Others say that agencies use celebrities because it is easy to convince clients of the benefits – a successful celebrity campaign could make clients' marketers famous and keep them comfortable in their position for a while.

Regardless of the practitioner's intention, one thing is certain: the use of celebrities is increasing. Around one-quarter of all commercials screened in the US include celebrity endorsers [2] and one in five campaigns in the UK feature them [3].

In the literature, several reasons for such extensive use of celebrities are explored. Atkin and Block [4] argue that because of their high profile, celebrities may help advertisements stand out from surrounding clutter, thus improving their communicative ability. Celebrities may also generate extensive PR leverage for brands [5]. For example, when Revlon  launched the 'Won't kiss off test' for Colorstay lipsticks in 1994, with the model Cindy Crawford kissing reporters, the campaign featured on almost every major news channel, and equally widely in the press [6].

Research findings are equivocal about the ability of celebrities to generate actual purchase behaviour, but Agrawal and Kamakura [7] and Mathur et al. [8] found a positive impact on the economic returns of companies using celebrity endorsers. The best example is the American basketball player Michael Jordan and his range of endorsements (for example, Nike, Coke, Wheaties, McDonald's, Hanes, WorldCom, Oakley, Gatorade). His involvement has been calculated to have contributed around $10 billion to the US economy during the14 years of his NBA career [9].

As well as promoting established brands, celebrities are used to promulgate new brand images, reposition brands or introduce new ones. For example, Lucozade, a soft drink brand that had been associated with sick children, was able to achieve a completely new image by being endorsed by famous athletes and footballers [10].

Celebrities with worldwide popularity can help companies avoid cultural 'roadblocks' such as time, space, language, relationships, power, risk, masculinity and femininity [11]. Toyota's 2002 global ad campaign with the actor Brad Pitt is a good example.

Several reasons are given in the literature for using celebrities as brand endorsers. In this article, which is part of a larger, in-depth study dealing with celebrity endorsement strategy, the aim is to explore practitioners' reasons.

What do agencies think?

The data were collected by mail survey. Respondents included agency directors/ managers working at agencies in membership of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), the British equivalent of the 4As in the US. Though they account only for around 10% of all UK advertising agencies, they transact more than 80% of total UK advertising expenditure [12].

Purposive sampling was used, with the objective of reaching agency managers who had been involved in celebrity campaigns. The names of managers were obtained by email and telephone. Besides identifying managers, these efforts allowed researchers to identify agencies relevant to the survey, since some might not have used celebrities. Indeed, 58 of 206 agencies were eliminated on this basis. In the event, 414 managers from 148 agencies were identified and included in the survey.

After two waves, 131 of 414 (31.6%) questionnaires from 80 of 148 (54%) agencies were received. In Europe 20–30% response rates are considered to be good [13]. Our response rate, at the high end of the scale, is almost the same as was obtained by Ferrell and Krugman (13) in the US.

As can be seen in Table 1, positions held by respondents varied from agency CEO/MD/chairperson to producers, but account handlers constituted the majority. However, there were no statistically significant differences among response rates. The domination of account handlers was intentional, since exploratory interviews revealed that they were most likely to manage the process of selecting celebrity endorsers.

The majority of respondents worked for agencies with annual billings above £12 million last year. Statistical tests show that response from the smallest agency category was significantly lower than for other categories except the second largest (F=4.52, P<.001). This may be because smaller agencies are less likely than their larger counterparts to use celebrities in campaigns (See Table 1).

Over 80% of respondents had at least six years of work experience. All had been involved in celebrity campaigns, with more than 40% being involved with six or more celebrity campaigns at the time of the survey. In light of this, it is considered that the findings are representative of UK ad agencies actively involved in the recruitment and use of celebrities.

The response

Table 2 shows that the highest mean value among reasons for using celebrities as endorsers was for their perceived ability to help campaigns have impact in today's ever more cluttered media environment. In other words, consistent with the academic arguments, managers perceived celebrity endorsement as one way to overcome media clutter. Celebrities' ability to generate PR coverage was the second most-agreed reason for their usage. Indeed, Gray [14] reported that PR practitioners believe that campaigns involving celebrities have a potential for extensive PR coverage, since not only print media but also entertainment-style programmes usually preview these ads.

Managers agreed that they were motivated to use celebrities because: celebrity values define and refresh brands; celebrities create aspiration for brands; and celebrities add new dimensions to brands. On the other hand, they were neutral about celebrities' ability to give instant credibility to brands and help global campaigns. As expected, managers did not agree that celebrities are used because clients prefer celebrity campaigns or because they were desperate for ideas.

To reduce the list of reasons to the basic dimensions, the data were subject to exploratory factor analysis by using principal component analysis with promax rotation. As Table 3 indicates, these statistics support the use of factor analysis to reduce the number of reasons from nine to three. The KMO test is at the high end of the scale, indicating that sampling is adequate. The Chi-square score of Bartlett's test of 'sphericity' is quite high, with a very high level of significance. Also, Cronbach's Alpha score, indicating reliability of the measurement scale, is acceptable.

Even though the total variance explained by the three components (58%) seems low, Hair et al. [15] argue that it is common for social scientists to consider satisfactory a solution accounting for 60%, or in some cases even less, of the total variance. In this particular test, possible explanation for a just-acceptable variance-explained figure may be that there are other reasons for using celebrities as endorsers. One might be the 'snowball effect': when one company uses a celebrity, inevitably others start considering using one for themselves.

Hair et al. [16] argue that naming the components is not scientific and it is usually left to the researcher's subjectivity, but the factor loadings indicating the correlation of each variable and component can provide some bases, since the higher the factor loading, the more representative the variable is of the component.

Furthermore, no individual variable had less than 0.5 factor loadings on one of the three components, which are named as follows:

• celebrity values

• building credibility

• clutter-cutting.

Celebrity values

The first component is celebrity values.

This reveals that one underlying reason for using celebrities is to transfer their values to brands. This is consistent with the academic argument put forward by McCracken [17] and findings of Langmeyer and Walker [18], which indicated that when celebrities are used in an ad campaign their personal qualities are transferred to products. One of the individual variables in this component is that agencies are desperate for ideas, which had a negative factor loading, indicating a negative correlation in the component.

Building credibility

The second component is building credibility into brands. When consumers see a celebrity using a product, they think that if it is good enough for her/him, it is good enough for them. Of course, the celebrity must be perceived to be credible to create this effect. A celebrity's credibility is determined by his or her perceived level of expertise [19], [20], [21] and trustworthiness [22], [23].

Clutter-cutting

The last component is clutter-cutting, since all the variables in this component are to do with standing out. Media clutter is widely acknowledged. Increasing competition for consumer consciousness and new-product proliferation have encouraged marketers to use attention-creating media stars. Moreover, technological innovations such as remote control television, PVRs, and cable and satellite diffusion have served to increase consumer power over programmed advertisements [24]. This makes advertising more challenging. A celebrity-endorsement strategy may ease the threat by helping to create and maintain consumer attention to ads and therefore make them stand out from surrounding clutter [25].

In summary, the findings show that ad agencies use celebrities not because it is  easy to convince clients or they are desperate for ideas, but because celebrity values transfer to brands, celebrities establish credibility around brands, and celebrity involvement brings added interest to the campaigns.

Nonetheless, managers should not think of celebrity endorsement as a norisk/all-gain strategy. As with any dynamic marketing communication strategy, there are potential hazards: a celebrity may overshadow brands, get into public controversy, disappear out of the media spotlight before the end of a contractual term, change his or her image, or become overexposed by endorsing many brands. In other words, individuals can change, and endorsement relations can sour. In a sense, a celebrity-endorsement strategy can be a double-edged sword, making selecting an endorser from innumerable alternatives very challenging. Therefore, managers must carefully consider both sides of the coin before they attempt use a celebrity in their campaigns.