A cultural exploration of consumers’ interactions and relationships with celebrities

Abstract

This paper offers a cultural exploration of young adult consumers' everyday interactions and relationships with celebrities. Adopting an interpretive methodology, we build on McCracken's (1986McCracken's ( , 1989 important work on cultural-meaning transfer, and integrate a contemporary understanding of consumers as co-creators of meaning, in order to explore their everyday experiences with celebrities. Findings suggest that consumers purposefully interact with celebrities in a diverse range of ways and actively engage in a variety of consumer-celebrity relationships. We conceptualise a range of consumer-celebrity relationship types and demonstrate the roles that celebrities can play in providing meaning and context to consumers' identity projects. Summary statement of contributionOur research builds on contemporary understandings of celebrity meaning transfer and in particular explores consumer-driven (rather than managerial) understandings of celebrity meanings. Our findings suggest that consumers' uses of celebrities are somewhat more active and purposeful than McCracken's (1989) model and much prior research suggests. Consumers develop portfolios of celebrity relationships, or celebrityscapes (cf. Fournier, 1998), which allow consumers the freedom and opportunity to flit between different (often fragmented) identity positions.

In for a penny, in for a pound? Exploring mutual endorsement effects between celebrity CEOs and corporate brands

“…Customers assume a more active role in the meaning transfer process, deriving considerable meaning from advertisements without necessarily consuming the goods that they advertise (Ritson and Elliott, 1999). They experience celebrities as socially and not just managerially constructed cultural brands (Banister and Cocker, 2014;O'Reilly, 2005). Moreover, the required multistage model, incorporating all contacts of celebrities with customers (Swain, 2004), has resulted in the rise of integrated marketing communications as a strategic concept, rather than a tactically oriented tool to build brand equity (Kitchen et al, 2004).…”

“…The contemporary phenomenon of celebrity has seen countless definitions from merely "being famous" (Epstein, 2005;Furedi, 2010), "well-known for his well-knownness" (Boorstin, 2012;Epstein, 2005), "the few, known by the many" (Banister and Cocker, 2014), "result of great good luck" (Milner, 2010), "celebrated not for doing, but for being" (Banister and Cocker, 2014) to "not born, but made" (Epstein, 2005). Similarly, the notion of celebrity has been substituted by various other abstract terms, including "heroes", "stars", "superstars", "television personalities", "idols" or "icons" (Epstein, 2005;Holmes and Redmond, 2006).…”

Would you forgive Kristen Stewart or Tiger Woods or maybe Lance Armstrong? Exploring consumers’ forgiveness of celebrities’ transgressions

“…Generation Y displays a general attentiveness towards social media (Bolton et al, 2013), where there is easy access to celebrity narrative or gossip (Gabler, 2001;Hermes, 2006;Marshall, 2006Marshall, , 2010. Hence, the influence of celebrities in this medium is significant (Banister & Cocker, 2014) as the celebrity's 'public self is presented through a new layer of interpersonal conversation' (Marshall, 2010, p. 41). Moreover, the size of the Generation Y segment, and its spending power (Wolburg & Pokrywczynski, 2001), makes it important to marketers seeking to understand the consumers' role in the acceptance or otherwise of the celebrity's brand.…”

“…To stand up for the celebrity or to redirect the blame elsewhere might help the consumer protect the para-social relationship from collapse. To remove one's association with the celebrity out of view from peers and public might assist in avoiding ridicule (Banister & Cocker, 2014). These strategies can be vital to buffer oneself from harm and for the para-social relationship (Wohlfeil & Whelan, 2012) to survive.…”

“…If the individual is not able to convincingly justify the transgression to their peers, then forgiveness is not likely to be given. In this case, it might be that consumers take their public association with the celebrity out of view of their peers so that it appears that they are taken out of their reference group to avoid ridicule from their peers (Banister & Cocker, 2014).…”