Exploratory Research On Neural Mechanism Of Celebrity Effect Based On ERP Experiment

Celebrity advertising and celebrity endorsements are among the most important marketing means and the most popular brand promotion mode in commodity market in modern society. Exploring celebrities'effect as brand ambassadors in the attention allocation and emotional arousal of the audience, and further the influence of such rational utilization to the celebrity endorsements in the background of marketing is very realistic significance. In addition, celebrity worship phenomenon is also one of the backgrounds of celebrity effect. Because of the extremely high level of worship to their loved celebrities, fans tend to be easier to be influenced by their worshipping celebrities than ordinary people. Based on these backgrounds, this study is to explore the celebrity effect behind the two phenomena.Previous studies mainly base on questionnaires, observation, or qualitative method, whereas not enough discussions about the psychological and the neural mechanisms were made. So far the reason why celebrity endorsements have better effect and more powerful influence on fans and audiences can't be answered. As the development of the cognitive neuroscience and nondestructive brain research methods, more and more social science researchers have started to use this method. The stud) which is based on the use of cognitive neuroscience method has made it possible for us to reveal the "black box" of human brain behind celebrity effect.This research use the event related potential (ERP) technology to complete the study, so as to explore the cognitive processing of celebrity effect of psychological process and the corresponding ERP composition. Research conclusions are as follows:1. The neural mechanisms of Celebrity effects are not present in its quick note and the processing of the circuit. As in this study, results show that the celebrity pictures and the non-celebrity pictures induced P2 components which have no significant differences between each other in the early stages. In conclusion, the celebrity images aren't significantly quicker and earlier in the processing and attention resource allocation than non-celebrity images.2. Celebrity endorsements memory extracting processes in ERP composition. Compared with the corresponding N2 composition for the celebrity pictures, celebrity pictures induced the N2 composition with significantly smaller amplitude, namely celebrity for audience are familiar and the effort for memory retrieval is smaller. In addition, celebrities" images induced significantly greater small amplitude to fans, as their performance of celebrity related memory retrieval was better.3. ERP composition LPP ingredients emotional awakening and sustained attention resource allocation process. The corresponding LPP amplitude caused when Fans watching the celebrity pictures is significant higher than watching other non-celebrity pictures and fans watching the celebrity pictures induced LPP with significantly greater amplitude than the non-fans.From the application perspective, N2 and LPP can be used in theory of neural mechanism of celebrity effects to partly proof the effectiveness of celebrity speak strategies and the celebrity worship phenomenon. Meanwhile, the study also indicates that celebrities cannot trigger higher degree of memory retrieval, emotional awakening and sustained attention resource allocations from general audiences than from their fans, and celebrity with the celebrity difference is only related to extract more memory, which can provide certain theoretical basis on the decision whether to adopt celebrity endorsement strategy.