Abstract

Celebrity endorsing products for promotion is a popular advertising strategy. As the cost of getting a celebrityfor promotion is substantially high, selecting the right celebrity is of great concern to advertisers. Extantliterature generally indicates numerous benefits from employing celebrity endorsement and has proposed quite afew mechanisms to explain the effectiveness of the celebrity endorsement. In spite of a great deal of research thathas tried to theorize the celebrity endorsement process, little is known about the criteria for choosing the rightcelebrity to endorse a particular product. A right celebrity endorser enhances the attitude towards theadvertisements and endorsed products, but an incorrect endorser may have a negative impact. Not only theconsumers’ attitude towards the advertisement and the endorsed product may go down, it may also impact thecelebrity endorser too. The purpose of this study is to explore whether the celebrity endorser’s image getsaffected by the incongruence of the endorsed product. The study was carried out to examine the celebrity imagedimension in the Indian context and celebrity/product mismatch effects. In the study a survey was done on theexisting celebrity image scale to see its suitability in Indian context. Further the scale was used in the experimentwhere different level of incongruence was tested on male and female celebrity from movies and sports toexamine the celebrity/ product incongruence effects. Results showed there is an effect of incongruentadvertisement on the celebrities’ image but not all celebrities are affected similarly. Different celebrities aretreated differently by the consumers. Some celebrities actually get positively affected while some get affectednegatively. The theory of cognitive dissonance has been used to explain this behavior. The interaction of thegender of the respondents with the gender of the celebrity was also found to be significant.

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