The effectiveness of celebrity endorsements: a meta-analysis

By Johannes Knoll, Jörg Matthes. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2016

522 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Celebrities frequently endorse products, brands, political candidates, or health campaigns. We investigated the effectiveness of such endorsements by meta-analyzing 46 studies published until April 2016 involving 10,357 participants. Applying multilevel meta-analysis, we analyzed celebrity endorsements in the context of for-profit and non-profit marketing. Findings revealed strong positive and negative effects when theoretically relevant moderators were included in the analysis. The most positive attitudinal effect appeared for male actors who match well with an implicitly endorsed object (d = .90). The most negative effect was found for female models not matching well with an explicitly endorsed object (d = −.96). Furthermore, celebrity endorsements performed worse compared to endorsements of quality seals, awards, or endorser brands. No publication bias was detected. The study has theoretical and practical implications, and provides an agenda for future research.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7f057c04c752cd08323e01fbadcb650707a18f9

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Citations in the corpus

How Can the Celebrity Endorsement Effect Help Consumer Engagement? A Case of Promoting Tourism Products through Live Streaming (2021, background): “It is an effective choice for a company to use the celebrity effect to carry out marketing activities to gain a competitive advantage [6,14].”
Does Celebrity Image Congruence Influences Brand Attitude and Purchase Intention? (2018, background): “By doing so, we respond to the call for future research in this area outlined by Knoll and Matthes (2017).”
Social entrepreneurship research: A review and future research agenda (2020, background): “…Narrative Review (Paul, Parthasarathy, & Gupta, 2017), theory based review (Gilal et al., 2018; Paul and Rosado-Serrano, 2019), meta -analysis (Knoll & Matthes, 2017), bibliometric review (Albort-Morant and Ribeiro-Soriano, 2016; Randhawa et al., 2016), review aiming for model/framework…”
The future of social media in marketing (2019, background): “The idea of using celebrities (in consumer markets) or wellknown opinion leaders (in business markets), who have a high social value, to influence others is a well-known marketing strategy (Knoll and Matthes 2017) .”
Review articles: purpose, process, and structure (2018, background): “(For some strong recent examples of marketing-related meta-analyses, see Knoll and Matthes 2017; Verma et al. 2016).”
Consumer, brand, celebrity: Which congruency produces effective celebrity endorsements? (2017, background): “In a recent meta-analysis, Knoll and Matthes (2017) detail the mixed impacts identified in celebrity endorsement models on consumer perceptions, attitudes, and behavior.”
Celebrity endorsement and brand passion among air travelers: Theory and evidence (2020, background): “The moderation of gender congruity into the relationship between source credibility and brand passion via relatedness need satisfaction is particularly relevant, as numerous studies have reported that the gender congruity can play a prominent role in modifying consumer’ attitude and behavior (Knoll ”
When Celebrities Count: Power Distance Beliefs and Celebrity Endorsements (2018, background): “We thus aim to advance understanding of the effect of PDB and its corresponding mechanisms on celebrity endorsements and advertising outcomes, for which cultural differences are still not well understood (Knoll and Matthes 2017).”