A Study On The Effect Of Celebrity Negative Information, Involvement And Brand Familiarity On Consumers’ Attitudes

Generally speaking, people tend to have celebrity worship. Thus, enterprises hope that celebrity endorsements can help improve well-knownness of their commodities and enterprises and arouse attention, interest and buying desire of consumers. Celebrity endorsement is an increasingly used means of competition in marketing practice. However, all kinds of celebrity negative information take place now and then, damaging images of celebrities’own, and may bringing negative effects to the endorsed brands. How will celebrity negative information influence consumer attitudes? It has been one of the most important problems for enterprises and marketing practitioners, and aroused more and more researchers’interest. Through two experiments, this thesis makes effort to find out the influence of endorsers’negative information, product involvement, and brand familiarity on consumer attitudes.Specifically, experiment 1 adopts 2 (endorsers’negative information:with negative information, without negative information) x 2 (product involvement:high, low) of experimental design, to discuss the impact of celebrity negative information and product involvement on consumer attitudes. The results are as follows:(1) by comparison, celebrity endorsement that employs endorsers with negative information can significantly lower brand attitude and purchase intention of consumers; (2) the effect of product involvement on attitudes-change is not significant. Consumer defense of celebrity negative information does not keep up with the pace of product involvement. Experiment 2 adopts 3 (endorsers’negative information type:without negative information, negative morality information, negative competence information) x 2 (brand familiarity:high, low) of experimental design, to discuss the influence of negative information type and brand familiarity on consumer attitudes. The results show that:(1) the main impact of celebrity’s negative information type on consumer attitudes is significant. No matter what type of negative information is presented, consumer attitudes are significantly reduced; meanwhile, influence degree of negative morality information is higher than that of negative competence information; (2) the main effect of brand familiarity on consumer attitudes is significant. Consumers prefer brands with high familiarity; (3) the main effect of interaction between celebrity’s negative information type and brand familiarity on consumer attitudes is not significant.The widespread use of celebrity endorsement, on the one hand, can bring enterprises huge business, on the other hand, also brings many potential risks, especially the impact of celebrity’s negative information. Celebrity’s negative information can harm images of both celebrity himself and enterprise. How to find out a proper way to deal with the problem is a particularly key question for enterprises. Based on 2 experiments, this thesis explores the influence of endorsers’negative information, respectively together with product involvement and brand familiarity on consumer attitudes, aimed at enriching theory and providing reference and guidance for enterprises faced with such practical problems and crisis brought by celebrity endorsement.