Introduction
The use of celebrity endorsements in advertising has become a trend and a perceived winning formula of corporate image building and product marketing. As existing media get increasingly cluttered, the need to stand out has become paramount and celebrities have proved to be the ideal way to ensure brand prominence.
Academic researchers have conducted sufficient empirical research to express the benefits of product endorsement, in addition to the intuitive arguments that rationalize this practice (Till and Shimp, 1998). Celebrities have the potential of helping the advertisements stand out from the surrounding clutter, guiding towards an improved communicative ability by cutting through excess noise in a communication process (Sherman,
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It has also been seen that one quarter of all advertisement use/feature a celebrity to endorse a product or brand. This validates the effectiveness of celebrity endorsements as a means of persuasive communication. It has the potential to enhance audience attentiveness, make the ad more memorable, credible, and desirable and add glamour to the endorsed product (Spielman, 1981).
Early researchers have found that celebrities are more effective than other types of endorsers, such as ‘the professional expert’, ‘the company manager’, or ‘the typical consumer’ (Friedman and Friedman, 1979). Using celebrity endorsers, companies may easily crack into consumer’s symbolic association to an aspirational reference groups, as celebrity endorsers are perceived as dynamic, attractive and likable (Assael, 1984; Atkins and Block, 1983; Kamins, 1990).
Today Celebrity Endorsement has become an integral part of the advertisement industry. In fact, celebrity endorsements are omnipresent feature of present day marketing, this whole true for the Indian perspective as well (O’Mahony.S, 1998). Celebrities are increasingly being used by marketers to get attention and recall of the consumers. Not only this, the marketers expect their brands to benefit in many more ways by linking their brands to the celebrities.
Consumer Ad