Are you the celebrity for my product? : a credibility study into the optimal choice of celebrity endorsers by category

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Diana Almeida da
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/25939
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Organizations are becoming more conscious about their communication budget and effectiveness. Therefore, choosing a celebrity to embody your product, needs to be carefully weighted. The study’s final output is a list of Portuguese celebrities that, in line with the methodology and literature, are most credible to represent each of the product. Freshly inserted into an FMCG company, I was curious about the process of choosing the celebrities that represent certain product categories, inserted into the macro category of Consumer Personal Care. After choosing the 10 categories, a focus group was conducted to brainstorm on the top 3 celebrities to most adequately represent the category. The top three was submitted to the Ohanian’s Credibility Model (1991), which suggests that Expertise, Trustworthiness, and Attractiveness, combined affect Credibility. The survey conducted asked which of the following three celebrities, in each category, was the primary choice. Then, the model was applied to assess if the credibility was in accordance with the choice. Finally, the survey assessed if the celebrity was, beyond being the most credible, also had the highest purchase intent. Concluding, the celebrity chosen verified as the most credible and the one with the highest purchase intent, in every category chosen. Within the study’s scope and methodology, the results revealed positive. Besides helping foreign corporations unaware of the Portuguese market, this study leads to an effective use of marketing and communication budgets, by having such a clear linkage of how a product category is represented and how it transforms into sales.