Celebrity Endorsements

Introduction

India today may be growing a fast pace but small grassroot problems still remain and continue to pull back the growth pace. One such big problem is Disease. We today have cure for almost every disease but what comes in the way is the narrow minded thinking of the public at large. So the problem is not of finding solution for diseases but the issue is of creating awareness for the disease. Now the awareness too has further issues to it. The reason being once the public has been educated often misconceptions arise. The situation is further aggravated by the different cultural and religious backgrounds to which the Indian population belongs. Another issue is the economic background to which the public belongs, leading a particular strata of the population to believe that it is completely immune to the problem. While in reality there exists no disease that differentiates on the above basis while affecting a person or while spreading up to the scale of an epidemic. Now the question that arises is how to address this awareness issue. Up till the only way that has come out is by getting a celebrity to campaign for the cause. A celebrity is a widely-recognized or famous person who commands a high degree of public and media attention. A celebrity is a person of high credentials people such as movie star, sports icons, TV personalities or popular entertainers. They have a high attention grabbing power and a large segment of the audience can instantly recognize and identify with the person and this attraction and goodwill associated with him/her can be transferred to the products. This is how the concepts of celebrity endorsement and the role of brand ambassador has developed over the years. A celebrity endorser is a celebrity who endorses a brand normally over media. A brand ambassador is a person who represents a brand both in the advertising media and the public relations function, that is, a celebrity who is the living representation of the brand to its consumer.

If a celebrity can effectively sell goods than it can surely do a job in generating awareness for these problems that seem to be pulling back the country's growth. But going by the number of celebrities selecting an appropriate celebrity for the cause too has its own complexities. Let us systematically look at process for identification and selection of a celebrity.

Objectives

The objective of our study is to find out, "What attributes should be kept in mind while selecting a celebrity for endorsing a social cause."

Methodology

The methodology that we used was to rate our scale by experts who are considered experts in the fields of Marketing. The people whom we contacted were either people from Ad agencies or Professors in the field of marketing teaching in various Business Schools in India. Then we did an analysis of the data obtained through quantitative techniques.

The scale that we used had been developed Robert Ohanian. The scale consists of rating the celebrity on the scale of 0 to 5. The scale consisted of three main attributes Expertise, Attractiveness and Trustworthiness. Each attribute further had attributes in them which are shown as under -

Let us look at each of the attribute in detail.

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness comprises of five factors namely Dependability, Honesty, Reliability, Sincerity and Trustworthiness. The trust factor in communication is the listener's degree of confidence in, and level of acceptance of, the speaker and the message.

The importance of these factors has also been shown by Giffin (1967) in his research which reviewed the concept of trust, in a tour of the centuries from Aristotle to King, and concluded that what Aristotle called "ethos," and what Hovland, Janis, and kelley (1953) called "source credibility," are the same concept: a listener's trust in a speaker. Furthermore, such terms as "favorable disposition," "acceptance," "psychological safety," and "perceived supportive climate" are often mentioned as favorable consequences of trust (Giffin 1967). Other studies have also supported the effect of trustworthiness on attitude change. For example, in the context of fear arousing communications, Miller and Baseheart (1969) investigated the impact of source trustworthiness on the persuasibility of the communication.

The results indicated that when the communicator was perceived to be highly trustworthy, an opinionated message was more effective than a non opinionated communication in producing attitude change.

However, when trustworthiness was low, this relationship was not significant. McGinnies and Ward (1980) manipulated a source's expertise and trustworthiness to assess the impact of each of these components on the communicator's persuasiveness.

Their findings indicated that a source who was perceived to be both an expert and trustworthy generated the most opinion change. In fact, the trustworthy communicator was persuasive, whether an expert or not. Further, Friedman and Friedman (1976), and Friedman, Santeramo, and Traina (1979) investigated several correlates of trustworthiness and concluded that celebrities who are liked will also be trusted. In addition, celebrity trustworthiness was highly correlated with a respondent's perceived

similarity to the source, the level of source's expertise, and the source's attractiveness.

Thus we can conclude that, trustworthiness of the communicator (celebrity) is an important construct in persuasion and attitude-change research. Thus, a reliable measurement of this construct requires a series of items, rather than the typical single item commonly used to measure the variable as trustworthy or not .

Expertise

Expertise is measured on five factors that are Expertness in the respective field, Experience, Knowledgeable, Qualification and Skillfulness of the celebrity.

Expertise is the second dimension of source credibility as defined by Hovland, Janis, and Kelley (1953). This dimension is also referred to as "authoritativeness" (McCroskey1966), "competence" (Whitehead 1968), "expertness" (Applbaum