Celebrity endorsement in the world of luxury fashion – when controversy can be beneficial

ABSTRACT

Can a negatively publicised celebrity endorser ever lead to favourable brand attitudes toward a luxury fashion product (i.e. a perfume)? An online experiment was conducted with a sample of 260 target-relevant female consumers where two factors were manipulated: the brand’s positioning objective (image reinforcement versus revitalisation) and the type of celebrity endorser (naturally versus incidentally controversial). Consumer attitudes towards the luxury fashion brand were generally more positive when the type of celebrity endorser was consistent with the brand’s positioning strategy, that is, when a naturally controversial celebrity endorses a brand with a reinforcement strategy and when an incidentally controversial celebrity endorses a brand with a revitalisation strategy. Furthermore, this effect was mediated by consumers’ appreciation of the celebrity-positioning match-up (i.e. the consistency between the celebrity’s persona and the brand’s strategy) but not by their perceptions of appropriateness (i.e. the traditional match-up hypothesis). Several implications suggested by these findings are developed.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity endorsement
• fashion
• scandal
• brand reinforcement
• brand revitalisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The participants were fully debriefed about the mock-up nature of the blog after the research.

2. It should be noted that the role of the media (glamorizing versus condemning the endorsement deal) as a potential moderator of the interplay between brand positioning strategy and celebrity endorser persona and brand attitude was tested as part of this research. Given that the factor did not have a significant impact on the attitude toward BrandX and did not change the impact of the other two factors, we did not include it in the analyses that follow. Figure 1 illustrates the glamorizing condition, as reflected in the 3^rd paragraph of the stimulus blog. Full results are available from the authors upon request.