The Impact On Advertising Communication Effect Of The Perceived Reputation-Overload Level

In recent years, using of celebrity endorsers in advertising has become one of the most prevalent marketing strategies. By virtue of the "halo effect" of celebrities, many advertisers want to rapidly improve the publicity and reputation of their brands. However, the "reputation" is a subjective concept, and many endorsers who are entitled with "famous movie stars", "international superstars" are not familiar to some of the advertising audiences. According to the survey, the average awareness of celebrity endorsers in the Super Bowl is only 78%, that is, it is almost 1/4 audiences are not familiar with the endorsers. Let alone some of the advertisers sign some stars who are lack of enough reputation or authority as endorsers and meanwhile mark them with a title of "famous stars" or "leading experts" or something like those in advertising. Therefore, whether because of the limitation of the celebrity endorsers or the advertisers’ intentionally exaggeration, it is inevitable that some of the celebrity endorsers are not familiar to some audiences.Nowadays, although there are many relevant literatures on the research of celebrity advertising and the advertising communication effect in different angles, there is a basis that the reputation of endorsers is accepted by audiences. In the practice of advertising, celebrity endorsers are not familiar to audience is a common occurrence. It is in the perspective of this part of audiences the study investigate thoroughly the formation mechanism of the advertising communication effect on the basis of the audiences who don’t accept the reputation of the celebrity endorsers.Drawing on extant literatures and research findings, this study creatively proposes the antecedent variable that affects advertising communication effect:the perceived reputation-overload level and take the perceived third-person effect, source credibility as intermediate variables, and take product classification as moderating variable. The hypotheses in this study were tested using a 2 (the perceived reputation-overload level:high vs. low)*2 (product classification:high involvement vs. low involvement) between-subjects experimental design and the data collected from the experiments were analyzed by SPSS and AMOS.From the dating analysis, this study draws a conclusion as follows:the perceived reputation-overload level affects advertising communication effect through three paths. Firstly, the perceived reputation-overload level can positively affect the advertising communication effect in a direct way; Secondly, the perceived reputation-overload level can affect advertising communication effect through negatively affecting source credibility; Thirdly, the perceived reputation-overload level can affect advertising communication effect through positively affect the perceived third-person effect. Otherwise, the classification of products not only can adjust the effects between the perceived reputation-overload level and source credibility, but also adjust the effects between the perceived reputation-overload level and the perceived third-person effect. To be specific, the negative correlation between the perceived reputation-overload level and source credibility is enhanced in the situation of endorsing high involvement product comparing with the situation of endorsing low involvement product. The positive correlation between the perceived reputation-overload level and the perceived third-person effect is enhanced in the situation of endorsing high involvement product comparing with the situation of endorsing low involvement product.According to the conclusions above, this study proposes some advices in advertising practice from the angle of selecting celebrity endorsers, the proper way of entitling of endorsers, debasing the level of audiences’perceived reputation-overload and so on. In the meanwhile, in the last parts of the essay, there are also some discussions about the limitations of this study and directions of further researches.