Contributions published at Marketing (Martin Natter)

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While there exists substantial research on Celebrity endorsement (CE), the concept of celebrity branding gained more interest in theory and practice during the last decade. One of the reasons is that celebrities are human brands that can be used to trademark a product instead of creating a new brand from scratch. This constitutes an interesting opportunity for marketers in times when building new brands imply costly and risky investments. However, one variation of celebrity branding gained little attention from academic research so far: celebrity co-branding (CCOB). In order to investigate the differences and similarities between CE and CCOB in the perception of consumers, we carried out two studies. The first one is qualitative: eight focus group interviews investigate differences between CE and CCOB. Depending on the celebrity application condition (CE vs. CCOB) subjects were exposed to manipulated versions of an ad for a fictitious premium store brand. In addition the composition of these groups is systematically varied with respect to panelists’ demographics (students, working people below 30, working people above 30, elderly). The results revealed that common concepts like attractiveness, credibility, match-up and mean transfer from CE research also apply to CCOB. However, due to the closer link between product and celebrity in the COOB condition consumers perceive a higher level of celebrity involvement with the product. This has consequences for product and brand evaluations. Study two is a quantitative experiment conducted in order to test the qualitative findings empirically.

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We present the results of an empirical study, in which we analyze the ability of the Ordered Weighted Average (OWA) operator to model actual preferences in a multi-attribute ranking task. We compare the OWA to a competing model (Simple Additive Weighting SAW), and we also study whether its characteristic feature, the ability to represent different attitudes toward compensation among attributes, is reflected in the preferences provided by subjects. We find that in general, the OWA model fits slightly less well to empirical data. Subjects whose preferences are better explained by the SAW model are also more consistent in their choice behavior. Our results furthermore indicate that preferences of most subjects are not fully compensatory. Thus the ability of the OWA operator to represent different attitudes toward compensation can be a useful feature in modeling actual preferences. The structure of the weights estimated for the OWA operator also suggests that it might provide a good approximation to certain types of decision heuristics.

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Retailers have used celebrity endorsement (CE), an advertising strategy, for several decades to advertise the retailer’s brand or their private labels (PL); however, the emergence of celebrity co-branding (CCOB), a branding strategy, in combination with PL is a relatively new trend worldwide. Evidence from practice indicates that the most successful co-branded premium PL are the ones offering a wide range of products. Apart from superior brand management, this trend might be a result of consumers’ perceived impact of CCOB increasing with the number of products co-branded by the same brand allies. The existing CE, CCOB, and traditional co-branding literature have not yet addressed the effect of multiple applications of any of these strategies on a range of products within the same brand (i.e., celebrity application frequency). However, applying existing findings on the effect of one endorser recommending many different brands to our research context, we hypothesize a negative impact when a spokesperson endorses multiple products within a brand. We propose that consumers perceive CE and CCOB differently when the number of endorsed or co-branded products increases. Indeed, our experiment reveals an interaction between celebrity application type and celebrity application frequency but no main effects. This finding indicates that when either strategy is applied multiple times within the same brand, product evaluations increase in the case of CCOB and decrease in the case of CE.

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