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INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
Celebrity endorsements are used globally across diverse marketing situations. Some prominent examples include George Clooney (actor, United States of America) for Nespresso Coffee machines, David Beckham (sportsperson, United Kingdom) for Adidas sportswear, Donnie Yen (actor and martial artist, Hong Kong) for Rotary International's Polio Campaign and Ricky Ponting (professional cricketer, Australia) for health supplements. Celebrities are highly recognizable and often admired by consumers thereby resulting in their use by marketers for brand endorsements (Belch and Belch, 2013). Marketers generally bank on a celebrity's broad appeal to generate greater brand recognition and recall as well as shape brand perceptions among consumers (Keller, 2013). From a branding perspective, a celebrity endorser is a human brand (Thompson, 2006) comprising of favourable symbolic and reference group associations (Stafford et al , 2002). When a celebrity pairs-up with a brand, consumers tend to incorporate celebrity-related associations into their existing knowledge of the endorsed brand as a result of perceptual inference mechanisms geared towards maintaining cognitive consistency (Keller, 2013), meaning that, consumers generally think that what is true of the celebrity must be true of the brand. Such perceptual mechanisms lead to a transfer of evaluative beliefs and feelings from a celebrity to the endorsed brand (Keller, 2013), culminating in enhanced brand evaluations (Till, 1998).
Academic research into celebrity endorsement has largely adopted the source credibility framework (Ohanian, 1990) to explain endorsement effects. As per the framework, credibility of an endorser (who is the source of communication) is typically conceptualized as comprising consumer perceptions of an endorser's attractiveness, expertise with the endorsed product and trustworthiness (Ohanian, 1990). Consumer perception of a celebrity endorser's credibility is generally positively associated with valued outcomes such as persuasiveness of the delivered message (Erdogan, 1999), recall of brand information (Speck et al , 1988), trust in the endorsed brand (Dwivedi and Johnson, 2013) and favourable endorsement advertising evaluations (Stafford et al , 2002). Despite offering valuable insights into the celebrity endorsement phenomenon, past studies have so far not addressed a fundamental consumer behavioural aspect that is relevant to celebrity-consumer interactions, namely, the role of celebrities in shaping consumer self-concepts. The desire to maintain the individual self-concept is considered a dominant driver underlying consumer marketplace behaviour (Sirgy, 1982; Belk, 1988). In the particular...