Investigation of the Attitudes Towards Celebrities Endorsed Advertisements – Audience Groups Comparison

Abstract

The use of celebrities for endorsement activities is a well established part of the marketing communication strategy. Yet, the communication “playground” is changing as we witness significant changes in the channels used for information transmission (as digital dominate the traditional) and in the audience (as generations change, growing up in a digital world). More, removing the communications’ constraints of space and time, the Internet led to the emergence of a new type of celebrity that seems to surpass the traditional ones. In this context, research in the celebrities’ endorsement area is still of significant relevance. Although many studies focused on investigating the effect of celebrity endorsement over consumer attitudes and behaviour, only few examined how audience factors influence these relationships. Hence, the main objective of this paper is to establish the variations in attitudes towards celebrities endorsed advertisements, considering the consumers’ age, gender, income and celebrity-product fit importance. The findings revealed significant differences in attitudes based on consumers’ age, income and product-celebrity fit importance, yet no distinctiveness in case of gender.