Is Celebrity Advertising Worth Celebrating?

1. To determine if products would perform better with celebrity endorsement,

exploratory research can be conducted followed by descriptive research. Focus
groups can be used to get consumer impressions of a particular product with
particular celebrities to see if the images match (in some qualitative sense), or
respondents can be asked to discuss celebrities who would make a good
spokesperson. In addition, case studies of similar products that have used
celebrity endorsements can be used to assess the likelihood of success with the
product. Exploratory research should be followed by descriptive research
involving a cross-sectional survey.

2. MDS can be used to assess the perceived similarity between the image of the
product and the image of the celebrity. Using proximities data, a perceptual map
of images of celebrities and brands can be created. The celebrity who is closest to
the brand would be the celebrity considered most similar to the product. If the
brand wanted to change its image, it could choose the celebrity perceived most
favorable on the desired dimensions.

3. Conjoint analysis can be used here. Here, celebrity is one of the attributes and all
relevant celebrities are levels of this attribute. This attribute should have an
additional level consisting of no celebrity endorsement. The celebrity who
achieves the greatest utility function with a given set of variables should be
considered for the spokesperson position.

4. A focus group that considered the responses of consumers to the ads and the
celebrities who most appealed to consumers for particular products could have
been conducted. This would provide the researcher some basis for positing the
sidedness of the ad and the appropriateness of the celebrities used before
experimentation.
If these precautions were not taken, it could be that the experiment confounds the
effects of sidedness with one of the other variables so that misinterpretation of the
 effect of sidedness occurs. When confounding occurs, the effect solely
attributable to the variable under consideration (sidedness) cannot be interpreted
because it interacts with other variables in producing the effect. In addition, if the
celebrity was not appropriate for the brand, the ANOVA results would be
misinterpreted since the celebrity would have had a minimal effect on the product
image.

5. The ANOVA results show a significant main effect for sidedness for purchase
intention, indicating that the sidedness affects purchase intention. The interaction
effect is not significant and mean values indicate that two-sided ads are more
effective.

There is a main effect for spokesperson for global brand attitude; however, results
are inconclusive since the interaction of sidedness and spokesperson is significant
and thus makes interpretation of the main effect tentative. Mean values indicate
that a celebrity endorsement is effective for two-sided ads but not for one-sided.

6. The ANOVA results show significant effects for both global brand attitude and
purchase intention. Table 1 indicates that a two-sided celebrity ad has the highest
mean for global brand attitude and purchase intention.

It is likely that the one-sided celebrity ad is the least effective since it has the
lowest mean on purchase intention, and second lowest (but approximately equal
to the lowest) mean on global brand attitude.

7. ANOVA is an appropriate technique since this is a 2 × 2 factorial design.

ANOVA allows us to compare the mean values of dependent variables, sidedness
and spokesperson, across the treatment effects, expectancy-value brand attitude,
global brand attitude, and global brand attitude toward the ad, and purchase
intention. To examine the effect on all the dependent variables simultaneously,
multivariate analysis of variance should be used.
8. Regression can be used by recalling that regression with dummy variables is
equivalent to ANOVA. In this case, three dummy variables should be used so that
the regression model is:

Y = a + ∑3i =1bi X i

where the Xi represent the dummy variables—two for the main effects and one for the
interaction effect, a the intercept, and bi the weights on the dummy vari