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Celebrity endorsements are not new. One of the earliest examples is Coca Cola who used Lillian Nordica, a Metropolitan Opera Star as their first model or endorser. She became a household name all across USA known as the Coca Cola Girl. Soon people forgot her as an actress but remembered her as the Coca Cola girl.
She did wonders for the brand and this led the company to release a series of these advertisements for over 30 years.

Relationships Between a Celebrity & a Brand

To understand how consumers associate celebrities to brands is well documented by a research study by Anderson (1976); Collins & Loftus (1975); Rumelhart, Hinton & McClelland (1986). In their study, associative learning principles were based on a conception of memory as a network consisting of various nodes connected by associative links. In the research context, celebrities and brands both represent nodes, which initially are unconnected but become linked over time through the endorsement process.

When a consumer thinks about a brand, the link with the celebrity node is animated to a certain level through spreading activation (Anderson 1983a). The joint activation of brand and celebrity provides a path over which one's evaluation of the celebrity has an opportunity to transfer to the brand. The key to the process is the simultaneous activation of the brand and celebrity nodes. Negative information about the celebrity activates the celebrity node, which then activates the brand node to some degree and allows reduced evaluation of the celebrity to transfer to the brand. Studies by Noffsinger et al. (1983) and Judd et al. (1991) provide empirical evidence demonstrating that attitudes can be affected in such a way.

It is also important to view the consumer in their social and cultural setting to further see how celebrity endorsements increase sales and impact brands over time. Celebrities usually form a very good example of a reference group appeal. This is particularly beneficial to a marketer and a brand who can cash in on the success of the star and, hence, push his brand. People who idolize their celebrities, hence, have a biased affinity to the brand their favorites endorse. As time passes on, they believe that they by adopting the brand that their celebrity endorses are becoming more like them. Celebrities can be used in four ways namely: testimonial, endorsement, actor and spokesperson.

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* Contributed by: -
Naveen Blazey & Shashi Kanth Ganti,
Goa Institute of Management, Goa.