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To explain it with the help of an example, we can take the case of Rahul Dravid and Castrol. The cricket icon is seen as "Mr. Dependable". And when he endorses Castrol, an image of "dependability" is tagged on to the brand under promotion.

5. The Importance of Celebrity Management

In a world full of faces, the ones' which bolt from the blue are perhaps of the celebrities. The advertisers are always on the look out for such faces for the purpose of endorsement. But, the major challenge before them is to find the right faces for their brands or in other words celebrity management. McCraken quotes, "In the best of all possible worlds, the marketing or advertising firm first would determine the symbolic properties sought for the product... It would then consult a roster of celebrities and the meanings they made available, and taking into account budget and availability constraints, would choose the celebrity who best represents the appropriate symbolic properties." This suggests that the image of the celebrity must fit or be congruent with the product which can be explained from the theoretical perspective using a social cognition framework.

5.1. Schema-Based Expectancy Theory

A schema is an abstract, cognitive structure that represents some stimulus domain, e.g., a person, place, event, or thing. It is organized through experience and consists of a knowledge structure. They can determine what information will be encoded or retrieved from memory. Schemas are involved in encoding, interpretation, retention, and retrieval of information. They can influence perceptual cognitive activities through the generation of expectancies. In the case of well-known celebrities, individual would typically have personal relevant schemas (person schemas), acquired over time. When a celebrity endorses a brand, the characteristics of that celebrity may be compared with the advertised attributes of the brand by the audience for congruence or fit with their available person-schema. The degree of congruence between the new information (the brand attributes) and the existing information (the celebrity's characteristics) may then influence the level of recall of the new information.

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* Contributed by -
Sohag Sarkar,
IBM Global Services (India) Pvt. Ltd.,
Bhopal (MP).