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Introduction
Nearly one-fourth of all advertisements use a celebrity endorsement strategy (Knoll and Matthes, 2017). While there are benefits to this approach, endorsers also present a number of potential risks: overshadowing or overexposing the brand; creating public controversy; and increasing expenses (Erdogan, 1999; Patel, 2009). To help mitigate these risks, it is suggested that endorsers should “match-up” with the brand and product (McCracken, 1989). Our current understanding of match-up, however, offers little guidance for choosing between a plethora of celebrities who have comparable attractiveness, trustworthiness and product expertise, yet still diverge in endorser effectiveness. Despite acknowledgment that additional types of match-ups are important and potentially consistent with the traditional match-up hypothesis (i.e. endorser-product; Wright, 2016), research is surprisingly scarce on other matching dyads (e.g. endorser-message). Thus, our main research question aims to uncover new evaluative criteria for endorser effectiveness:
How does a match between social judgments of a celebrity endorser and type of advertising messaging affect consumer response to an endorsement?
Sääksjärvi et al. (2016) assert that the optimal choice of celebrity endorser is subject to boundary conditions and call for future research that investigates the types of psychological evaluative criteria that consumers use to judge and relate to endorsers. Hence, we propose that matching social judgments of the celebrity endorser (i.e. warmth and competence; Fiske et al., 2002) with certain types of advertising appeals (i.e. symbolic and utilitarian; Cheng and Schweitzer, 1996) can enhance perceived fit and influence consumer affective, cognitive and behavioral responses. A more positive response to endorsements can be achieved by matching consumer perceptions across these sets of dimensions, as pairing brand-related cues with advertising messaging enhances consumer processing, improves ad effectiveness and drives purchase behaviors (Zhang et al., 2014). However, devising persuasive endorsed messages has proved to be inordinately difficult (Kwon et al., 2015), and many brands have failed to understand the importance of endorser-message match-up.
For example, Snoop Dogg’s “Hack is Wack” interactive ad campaign for Symantec was labeled as “the most spectacularly failed attempt to redeem [cybersecurity’s] image in the industry’s history,” with minimal responses of user-generated content and significant negative buzz on social media (Greenberg, 2010). This may be partially attributable to the choice of functional ad appeals (e.g. “Hack is...