Aristotle meets online endorsers – implications of ancient philosophy for modern marketing communications

ABSTRACT

This work identifies the differences in the relevance of online endorsers’ physical attractiveness and expertise depending on whether an endorsed product is related to attractiveness. It provides a new perspective regarding the source-credibility model and explores unprecedented relationships. To date, many studies investigating online endorsers have focused on attractiveness-related products, but online endorsers are also employed for attractiveness-unrelated products. Practitioners therefore need to know which requirements are relevant to attractiveness-unrelated products. However, no existing study has compared online endorsers of attractiveness-related or attractiveness-unrelated products. Our investigation is based on an empirical experiment including 576 participants, analyzed with structural equation modeling. The subsamples are compared by multigroup analysis, resulting in counterintuitive results. Both online endorsers and practitioners can greatly benefit from our findings. Our findings indicate that attractiveness is a relevant requirement for both types of products, although attractiveness has a stronger impact on brand-related variables of attractiveness-related products. Male attractiveness is also more relevant than female attractiveness regarding attractiveness-related products. Concerning expertise, we find no differences between the two types of products.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy and/or ethical restrictions.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any funding.