Essays on Celebrity Endorsements: Human and Cultural Branding in Consumer Markets

明星代言:人與文化品牌在消費者市場

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

View graph of relations

Author(s)

  • Dave De Guzman CENTENO

Related Research Unit(s)

Detail(s)

Awarding Institution
Supervisors/Advisors
Award date19 Jul 2016

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation offers perspectives on celebrity endorsements through the lens of a human brand identity formed along with cultural elements tied to it in the context of consumer markets where tools of sponsorship marketing and advertising strategies are employed. Two essays containing empirical studies – qualitative and quantitative research, discuss the implications of celebrities when shifting from the monolithic paradigms of celebrity endorsement models to a multidimensional view of human brand identities in persuasion and communication.
Essay 1 examines the co-creation of human brands identities exemplified by celebrities in a stakeholder-actor approach. By bringing together the theoretical web of service-dominant logic, stakeholder theory, actor-network theory, and consumer culture theory, we argue that human brand identities are co-created by multiple stakeholder-actors that have resources and incentives in the activities that make a up an enterprise of a human brand, including the celebrities themselves, consumer-fans, and business entities. By utilizing an observational, archival netnographic data from popular social media channels, four exemplars of celebrity identities demonstrate the co-creation of human brands. Findings illustrate key actors’ participations, production and consumption, and integrations of resources and incentives in the co-creation process as articulated in social media. The co-creation process happens through sociological translations codes namely: social construction and negotiation of identities, parasocialization, cultural projection, legitimization, and utilization of human brand identities. These dynamics of human brand identity advance a stakeholder-actor paradigm of service co-creation that is adaptive to the predominant consumer culture and human ideals that surround the celebrity. Implications and future research on celebrity brand marketing management are discussed.
Essay 2 examines the effects of social distance of celebrity endorsers, their nationality, and consumers’ situational ethnocentricity, on attitudes toward the advertisements featuring celebrities. Three laboratory studies show that the endorsement is more effective when the advertisement features celebrities as socially close others than when they are more distant (study 1). Also, the effect of close social distance is greater when the celebrity is local than foreign (study 2). Finally, when ethnocentricity is high, advertising attitudes increase with social closeness when the celebrity is local but decrease with social closeness when the celebrity is foreign. On the other hand, the effects on low ethnocentricity are diametrically opposite: advertising attitudes increase with social closeness when the celebrity is foreign, and decrease (instead of remaining constant) with social distance when the celebrity is local (study 3). We propose that these effects are mediated by consumer self-referencing. Anchoring on the theoretical foundations of construal level theory and its generalized sensitivity of combinative distance dimensions, and on social identity theory, implications on relational paradigm in celebrity endorsements and on international marketing communications are discussed.