The Impact From Celebrity Endorser On Consumer Attitude Toward The Brand And Advertisement

In order to capturing customers' mind share in this crowded market, marketers commonly use celebrity endorsement as their one major marketing strategy. In China cosmetic is one of the growth industries that attract foreign brands and also an industry that heavily advertised with celebrities. As one of those foreign companies, L'Oreal aimed to attract these 1.2 billion potential customers to expand their global scope. Today, the company manufactures locally and has made Maybelline a leader in China's top-selling cosmetic products. One of Maybelline's success strategies to enter Chinese market was signed up Zhang Ziyi, the highest-paid Chinese actress today, as their spokesperson. This move has helped Maybelline to reach 33% of the Chinese cosmetic market. Moreover, this phenomenon made the writer curious what kind of aspects that helped Zhang Ziyi creates such positive influence.The first purpose of this study is, to investigate the relationship between customer's perception of Maybelline and Zhang Ziyi. Second, to investigate whether Zhang Ziyi creates significant impact to the brand's perception when she acts as the endorser. And the last purpose is, to investigate the correlation between independent variables - physical attractiveness, source of credibility, source of expertise and the product/brand match-up, -and the dependent variables - customer's attitude toward the advertisement and the brand. Our main findings are customers have higher positive perception of Zhang Ziyi comparing with Maybelline, and further findings indicate that celebrity endorsement generates higher positive attitude toward the advertisement and the brand. Meanwhile, celebrity/brand match-up is the only variable does not generate any positive effects on customers' attitude toward either the advertisement or the brand.