So now let's think about celebrity endorsements in
terms of these two roles of, of persuasion.
So in one way, you can use a celebrity in a central processing way.
And in that way the idea's going to be the, the celebrity is an expert.
And the reason that the celebrity endorsement
matters is because that person's an expert
and therefore there's information in that endorsement.
Celebrity as a peripheral cue is going to be, because the celebrity's attractive, or
because I like the celebrity, then I want to use the products that they use.
So celebrities can be used in both ways.
Either in a central, or in a peripheral way.
When you're thinking about different celebrities to use to help endorse your
products, there's certain things you want to think about.
First of all, who's the target segment,
and does that target segment like that celebrity.
So that's going to be an important thing.
Then you want to think about what's the brand message?
And does the message of the brand, the brand
mantra, fit the, the brand message of the celebrity?
As, then another thing you want to think about is how attractive is the celebrity?
Is this a popular, a, a, a positive celebrity?
Because you don't want to take a celebrity that nobody likes, obviously.
Other considerations are how, how costly it is.
Celebrities can be very expensive. Is it worth it?
Some of them are, are cheaper.
Maybe that's a better, value for your money.
And nowadays very, very important is the social network.
So some of the celebrities that are chosen for endorsement is because they have a
very, very strong social network and they have a lot of followers, and so the clout
scores and those kinds of different scores
are indicating the social connectiveness of these
different celebrities, and all of those go
into the decision of which celebrity to choose.
There's another thing that's out there to rate these different celebrities.
It's called a Q-rating.
And, the Q-rating says, how appealing is the
celebrity among those who do not know him.
It's the ratio of popularity and familiarity.
And, it's conducted
by a particular company called Marketing Evaluations.
And, you can get Q-ratings for different celebrities to help
you judge which is a good celebrity and which is
a celebrity that maybe isn't as strong and maybe you
don't want to pay as much money for or something like that.
So what's the I think you're probably starting
to get the idea of how these celebrities work.
formally we think of it as the notion of
transfer of meaning.
And that's the model that's used to indicate the effectiveness of celebrities.
So, the idea is that celebrities have very charged, powerful meanings.
And what you want to do is transfer the meaning of that celebrity to your product.
So, advertising firms, marketing firms, branding firms try to
choose a celebrity that best represents the, the appropriate
symbolic properties of the product.
So that that meaning from that celebrity will
then transfer to the meaning of the product.
And celebrities are quite powerful.
There have some been some fMRI studies that show that when you show
an image of just a normal person, certain areas of the brain light up.
But if you show an image of a celebrity, different areas of the brain light up.
So there's an automatic or
visceral reaction to celebrities. They just get more attention.
and they can be very, very effective at
creating an brand image and, at differentiating a brand.
If a celebrity's associated with one brand, and
not another, that can be a very effective differentiation.
And going back to this elaboration likelihood model, when you
think of the celebrity as working in a central processing way
we talk about that as having a credible source.
And so in that way, the celebrity is an
effective spokesperson, because of their expertise and their trustworthiness.
So one of the very effective, at the time, spokespeople for Nike was Tiger Woods.
Now, obviously, there's been some controversy
around Tiger Woods in more recent time.
But when Tiger Woods was the first spokesperson for Nike Golf he
worked in two ways.
His, he was very credible as an endorser for golf
products because he was such a successful golfer and obviously you
think there's some expertise in him, in his golfing ability
and he knows what he's talking about with regard to product.
That's a central processing kind of use of Tiger
Woods and that's source credibility, he's a credible source.
The other way of thinking about Tiger Woods
is he's also an attractive source, people liked him
at the time, they were very familiar with him.
And anything he did, people would like.
So he was used as a spokesperson not only for golfing and for Nike, but he's also
used for other products which were not necessarily based
on his expertise, but just based on his attractiveness.
And when he got into some scandal and some issues
where his attractiveness was not as strong, some of those
endorsements were dropped because he was no longer an attractive source.
The ones that tended to stay with Tiger
were based more on his credibility, as a source.
And you can see when you think about these different methods of persuasion why
some companies might keep him and some companies might not want to keep him.
