Effects of Fit, Consumer Involvement and the Number of Celebrities on Consumer Behavior in an Emerging Market

ABSTRACT

By using the tri-process model (consensus, elaboration likelihood, and fit), the authors conduct a pilot study followed by an experiment to examine the effects of consumer involvement, fit, and the number of celebrities on consumer behavior in a series of brand endorsement ads. The robustness of the fit results is confirmed across two communication modalities: TV and internet. Specifically, more celebrities are not always better. Fit matters whether the product/brand endorsement is by two or four celebrities. Fit among multiple celebrities remains important for high involvement target audience, but the number of celebrities (consensus effect) is more important for the low involvement target audience. The results of this research suggest that both high and low involvement audience can be targeted at the same time depending on the level of fit and the number of celebrities used in a brand endorsement.

KEYWORDS:

• Multiple celebrities
• consensus
• fit
• elaboration likelihood

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2011 AMA Winter Marketing Educators' Conference in a poster session, and a copy of the abstract was published in the Conference Proceedings.

Funding

A Ministry of Education of China research grant (#08JZD0019) awarded to the first author is gratefully acknowledged. A National Science Foundation of China research grant to the first author Haizhong Wang (# 91172164) and a National Science Foundation of China research grant to the corresponding author Jing Yi Wang (#71202099) are gratefully acknowledged.