Content area
Full text
Abstract
The rise in celebrity athletes' influence due to social media has had a massive effect on endorsement opportunities. Social media has given celebrity athletes an owned platform from which to leverage their audience into business opportunities, but an understanding of how authenticity affects the consumer was needed. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine how the perceived authenticity of celebrity athletes' social media endorsement posts affects brand attitudes and purchase intentions. Two experiments were conducted using fictitious Twitter posts including celebrity athletes to manipulate authenticity. Study 1 established that authenticity of a post has a significant effect on brand attitudes and purchase intention. Study 2 introduced two new celebrities and one new product. The importance of authenticity remained consistent with Study 1. Additionally, the type of brand had a greater effect when the promoted product required more purchase consideration when compared to an impulse purchase. Tastly, the celebrity promoting the product was not found to be significant. This research expands on the growing stream of knowledge related to authenticity in marketing communications and confirms its vital role.
Keywords: athlete branding, endorsement, authenticity
Introduction
The use of celebrity endorsements is a popular marketing strategy. One single company, Nike, has committed to spending $475 million annually on endorsing athletes (Sokolovska, 2016). Advertisements featuring a celebrity endorsement range from 10% in the United States to as high as 40% in Japan and Korea, with 60% of those ads in partnership with celebrity athletes (Carlson & Donovan, 2008; Schimmelpfennig, 2018; Twose, 2013); however, the endorsement industry may be heading toward turbulent times.
There are problems associated with the use of a celebrity endorser. Authenticity of followers and authenticity of the message have been scrutinized by big brands such as Unilever CMO Keith Weed (Greiwe, 2018). The rise of social media as an endorsement platform has amplified authenticity issues. In July 2018, Twitter publicly purged over 70 million accounts that were considered fake or suspicious, and basketball superstar TeBron James lost more than 880,000 followers. Greiwe (2018) noted that a follower count is not important if those followers are not inspired to act. However, superstar athlete endorsers are still commanding exorbitant payments, totaling as much as $750,000 for a single social media post from Cristiano Ronaldo...