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Before the London games, I was the number one ranked hurdler in the world. But I had no major Olympic sponsor. And so that's when I did a little bit of thinking and research and I was like, "Okay, who is getting the top sponsorships? What athletes are, and what are they doing differently that I am not?" The highest one on all of their lists was, "How many Twitter followers do they have? How many Facebook likes do they have?" So from that moment on, I made sure to try to make social media a priority
(Ewing and Grady, 2013).
Introduction
The quotation above comes from US hurdler Lolo Jones on an episode of the ESPN documentary film Nine for IX titled Branded . In this episode, Lolo Jones discussed her journey toward constructing her celebrity and the strategies she used to do so, which resulted in becoming a media phenomenon and acquiring sponsorship deals with McDonald's, Asics, and Red Bull, just to name a few (Ewing and Grady, 2013).
In general, celebrity refers to a social actor who maintains the ability to generate a significant amount of public attention and prompt positive emotional reactions from stakeholder audiences (Rindova et al. , 2006). Historically researched in areas such as sociology and marketing, there is an emerging body of organizational literature examining celebrity. Seminal work in this area has described the creation of celebrity (e.g. Hayward et al. , 2004). For instance, Rindova et al. (2006, p. 52) attributed celebrity to "mass communication of carefully selected, prearranged, and oftentimes manipulated information about an individual's personality, talent, and style in order to create a 'persona' that triggers positive emotional responses in audiences." Specifically, they noted how journalists pursue information thought to be novel and unknown by the public, dramatize the information into a story, while emphasizing certain aspects in order to draw attention to the issue. Rindova et al. (2006) also commented that social actors' impression management (IM) (oftentimes nonconforming actions) contributes to media's construction of the celebrity. As a point of clarification, it must be pointed out that celebrity athletes are different than "traditional" celebrities.
Building from this research, scholars have investigated celebrity from a resource (e.g. human capital) and strategic opportunity (e.g. partnerships, endorsements)...