Celebrity vs. Influencer endorsements in advertising: the role of identification, credibility, and Product-Endorser fit

By Alexander P. Schouten, Loes Janssen, Maegan Verspaget. Leveraged Marketing Communications, 2019

1,369 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract In their marketing efforts, companies increasingly abandon traditional celebrity endorsers in favor of social media influencers, such as vloggers and Instafamous personalities. The effectiveness of using influencer endorsements as compared to traditional celebrity endorsements is not well understood. Therefore, the present research investigated the impact of celebrity vs. influencer endorsements on advertising effectiveness (attitudes toward the advertisement and product, and purchase intention), moderated by product-endorser fit. Moreover, this research investigated two potential mediators underlying this relationship: identification (perceived similarity and wishful identification) and credibility (trustworthiness and expertise). Two experiments (N = 131, N = 446) investigated celebrity vs. influencer endorsers with good vs. poor fit with a beauty and a fitness product (Study 1), or a food and a fashion product (Study 2). Overall, our results showed that participants identify more with influencers than celebrities, feel more similar to influencers than celebrities, and trust influencers more than celebrities. In terms of advertising effectiveness, similarity, wishful identification, and trust mediate the relationship between type of endorser and advertising effectiveness. Product-endorser did not explain the relationship between type of endorser and any of the mediating and dependent variables. In all, our results show the added value of using influencer endorsers over celebrity endorsers and the importance of similarity, identification and trust in this process.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c52f7dc00838b8d744bcd70d1e97238b789c99af

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Citations in the corpus

Social Media Influencers and Followers: Theorization of a Trans-Parasocial Relation and Explication of Its Implications for Influencer Advertising (2021, background): “Also explored are the roles of source credibility, content value, parasocial interaction/relationship, and congruity in the effectiveness of influencer campaigns (Boerman and Van Reijmersdal 2020; De Veirman, Cauberghe, and Hudders 2017; Lou and Yuan 2019; Schouten, Janssen, and Verspaget 2020).”
The effects of ad heuristic and systematic cues on consumer brand awareness and purchase intention: Investigating the bias effect of heuristic information processing (2021, background): “…prior studies examine the effectiveness of influencer posted ads with their personal characteristics (Lou and Yuan, 2019；De Veirman et al., 2017; Schouten et al., 2020), few studies evaluate the effect of influencer poster v. s. Firm poster on consumer brand awareness when controlling the…”
Parasocial interactions with real and virtual influencers: The role of perceived similarity and human-likeness (2022, background): “At the same time, it should be noted that even if media users do not consider a certain media persona as similar to themselves, they might still aspire to become more like them—which might again increase parasocial reactions (Lim et al., 2020; Schouten et al., 2020).”
The impact of the source credibility of Instagram influencers on travel intention: The mediating role of parasocial interaction (2021, background): “been revealed that the credibility of SMI’s has a significant effect on the perceptions and purchase intentions of users who follow them or are familiar with them (Schouten et al., 2019; Wang and Scheinbaum, 2017; Xiao et al., 2018).”
Keeping up with influencers: exploring the impact of social presence and parasocial interactions on Instagram (2021, background): “…have suggested that consumers strongly identified themselves with influencers and view them as more relatable and trustworthy figures than traditional celebrities, which results in positive brand attitudes toward advertisers (schouten, Janssen, and verspaget 2020; Jin, Muqaddam, and Ryu 2019).”