Virtual Celebrities for Fashion Branding in China

Abstract

Luxury fashion brands heavily use celebrity endorsements for promotion. However, there are risks that a real-person celebrity may trigger controversial issues which may negatively affect the endorsed brand. Virtual influencers look very close to real people thanks to development of technology. Thus marketers have an opportunity to adopt virtual celebrities instead of real-person celebrities to avoid risks of scandals caused by human beings. It is of interest to find out whether virtual celebrities have similar influencing effect as realperson celebrities over customers’ purchase decision in the fashion industry? Will customers’ attitude and perceptions towards both types of celebrities the same? Will virtual celebrities replace real-person celebrities? As Gucci and LV adopt both real-person celebrities and virtual celebrities, we use video ads of Gucci and photo ads of LV for comparison. The results show that virtual celebrities may still lag behind real-person celebrities from the perspectives of a modified customer action model and characteristics of celebrities. However, the appearance of meta-human virtual celebrities and enhancing recognition of virtual celebrities may help improve the effectiveness of virtual celebrities.