Celebrity Endorsement on Rural Consumers

The celebrities in India are the role models for majority of Indians, they are so influenced by them that most of the population follows the trends of their dressing, styles and habits. This is the major reason for the companies to hire the celebrities to promote their products. The companies invest billions of to hire the celebrity for the promotion of their product. The companies believe that the celebrity changes the purchase intention of the consumers in India. The study is conducted to find out the impact of celebrity on rural consumers of Lucknow district of Uttar Pradesh. In order to analyze the objective of the study the data was collected using convenience sampling from 300 respondents belonging to the randomly selected areas of Lucknow. The secondary data was collected through different sources such as- Journals, Magazines, Internet, and Newspaper etc. Null hypothesis was framed and analytical Techniques are the statistical tools that are used for analyzing the collected data. The frequency tables were used to represent the collected data. One sample T-test was used to test the hypothesis and ANOVA was used to calculate the significance level of impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers. The SPSS 17 is also used as statistical software to analyze the collected data. It is found that the Indian consumers prefer celebrities in the television commercials.

Keywords – Brand Building, Brand Promotion, Celebrity Endorsements, Indian Television Commercials.

INTRODUCTION

The celebrities in India are the role models for majority of Indians, they tries to follow their styles, clothes and their small habits. Celebrity endorsement is most acceptable and common phenomenon that companies use to attract their consumers across the world. They believe that celebrities can influence the purchasing decision of their prospect consumers as they have special places in the heart of consumer. Therefore after analyzing the degree of involvement to follow the celebrities, the companies started hiring various bollywood and sports stars for the commercial advertisements. That is why the promotional budget for advertising has taken many financial folds compared to past investments. The companies invest billions of Rupees over hiring a celebrity for their product promotion. Such endorsers are seen as dynamic with both attractive and likeable qualities and companies plan that these qualities are transferred to products via marcom activities. Furthermore, because of their fame, celebrities serve not only to create and maintain attention but also to achieve high recall rates for marcom messages in today’s highly cluttered environments. Theory and practice prove that the use of super stars in advertising generates a lot of publicity and attention from the public (Ohanian 1991). Therefore, Celebrity endorsement has been established as one of the most proffered tools of advertising. It has become a trend and perceived as a winning formula for product marketing and brand building. It is very easy to have a celebrity for a product or brand but it is very tough to establish a very strong association between the product and the endorser: because the objective is to build a brand not the celebrity: if properly matched it can do wonders for the company, but it also has a number of potential problems like failure of celebrity in his profession, controversy, etc.

LITERATURE REVIEW

According to McCracken (1989), a celebrity could be defined as,

“Any individual who enjoys public recognition and who uses this recognition when they appear in the advertisement in front of the Consumers”.

There are multiple roles that a celebrity spokesperson may play (and the roles may not be mutually exclusive) (Kamen, Azhari and Kragh, 1975) in an advertisement such as that of a spokesperson, endorser, provider of a testimonial, or an actor. A spokesperson represents the company or brand like a salesman, while an endorser is associated with the brand even though he may not be an expert in the product category of the brand. In case of testimonials, the superiority of the product is attested by an individual or the personal experience of the celebrity. Lastly, the celebrity actor is only a character in a dramatic presentation in the advertisement.

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McCracken (1989) suggested four different modes of celebrity endorsers namely, Explicit mode, Implicit mode, Imperative mode, and the Co-present mode. In the explicit mode, the celebrity announces the endorsement of a product, while in the implicit mode; the celebrity uses verbal or physical communication for the product. In the imperative mode, the celebrity suggests the audience to use the endorsed product while the celebrity only appears with the product in the co-present mode.

The studies of celebrity endorsements in the past 30 years have centered around two broad themes: source credibility and celebrity-brand congruence. Source credibility studies focus on the factors defining the credibility of a celebrity. Credibility of a celebrity has been found to be

a major factor influencing consumer attitudes. Research has identified three dimensions of source credibility: attractiveness, expertise, and trustworthiness. Some of the studies (e.g., Ohanian, 1990) have used all the three dimensions to develop a scale that can measure credibility. On the other hand, there are studies that have analyzed only one or two dimensions of credibility and its impact on the consumer (Weiner and Mowen, 1986; Friedman and Friedman, 1979; Kamins and Gupta, 1994). However, the findings from these studies have been quite contradictory. While some studies have found trustworthiness to be the most important dimension of source credibility (McGinnies and Ward, 1980; Atkin and Block, 1983 and Kamins, 1989), others have emphasized attractiveness (Baker and Churchill, 1977; Kahle and Homer, 1985; Caballero et al., 1989; Silvera and Austad, 2004) or have suggested expertise (Maddux and Rogers, 1980; Ohanian, 1991) to be the most important parameter.

Around 64 per cent of the commercials used the implicit mode of celebrity portrayal for different product categories. Usage of film celebrities was more extensive than sports celebrities in major product categories. This was probably because the shelf life of fame for a film celebrity is more than that of the sports celebrity. Male celebrities dominated the product categories like food and beverage, automobiles, and consumer durables. The female celebrities were featured majorly in beauty products. No distinct association was found between the product categories considered and the mode used for celebrity portrayal. (Jain et al. 2010)

Using a celebrity for endorsement is not a new occurrence but prevalent since 19th century. Celebrity endorsements help to break the clutter and differentiate the brand. It also helps in image repair of a brand (Kaikati, 1987). In today’s world where thousands of advertisements come across people in various forms, celebrity endorsement can easily win the confidence of consumers (Sabnavis, 2003). Celebrity helps in increasing profitability of the organization. In fact, celebrity endorsement is more effective than non-celebrity endorsement in generating attitudes towards advertisement (AAD), attitude towards brand (AB) and purchase intention (PI) (Erdogan, 1999).

Research findings suggest that the percentage of celebrity advertisements out of the total number of ads aired is as high as 25-30% in western countries and around 60% in India (Patel, 2009). In such a scenario both academia and industry look for the issues in selection, use and effectiveness of celebrities as product endorsers. Research in celebrity endorsements in the last thirty years have tried to address various issues in celebrity endorsements such as the effects of credibility of endorser on the consumers (Friedman and Friedman, 1979; Goldsmith et al., 2000), issues in celebrity product ‘match-up’ (Kamins, 1990; Till and Busler, 1998), meaning transfer in celebrity endorsements (McCracken, 1989) and a host of other issues such as effect of negative celebrity information, cross country comparison of celebrity advertising, gender and celebrity endorsement perceptions, etc.

Celebrity endorsements is been accepted to be a ‘ubiquitous feature of modern day marketing’ (McCracken 1989). It has also been seen that one quarter of all advertisement use/feature a celebrity to endorse a product or brand. This validates the effectiveness of Celebrity endorsements as a means of persuasive communication. It has the potential to enhance audience attentiveness, make the ad more memorable, credible, and desirable and add glamour to the endorsed product (Spielman, 1981).

OBJECTIVES OF THIS STUDY

The study is conducted to find out the impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers of Lucknow District.

HYPOTHESIS OF THE STUDY

The null hypothesis that there is no impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers was framed for the study.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

STUDY AREA

The Study is conducted in the Lucknow city of Uttar Pradesh. Further, the respondents are selected from four different areas namely, Malihabad, Mohanlalganj, Banthara and Bakshi ka Talab of Lucknow.

SAMPLING METHOD AND SAMPLE SIZE

The sample method used to select the area for this study is random sampling technique. The sample method that was used to collect data from the population was convenience sampling. Sample size identified for the research is 300 respondents from Lucknow district.

DATA COLLECTION

The Study is based on Primary data and Secondary data both. The primary data is collected through structured questionnaire from the 300 respondents from Lucknow. The secondary data is collected through the magazines, journals, periodicals, people opinion and internet.

ANALYTICAL TECHNIQUES

Analytical Techniques are the statistical tools that are used for analyzing the collected data. The one sample t-test was used to test the hypothesis. ANOVA was used to find out the impact of celebrity on rural consumers. The SPSS 17 statistical software is also used for doing the calculations

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

The study was conducted in rural areas of Lucknow. Using the random sampling technique the rural areas of Lucknow were selected. The study was done at Malihabad, Banthara, Bakshi ka Talab and Mohanlalganj. The total sample size targeted for study was 300 respondents from the selected areas but the responses were received from 277 respondents. The convenience sampling was used to collect the data from the respondents using structured questionnaires.

The respondents were categorized in the age group 0- 10, 10- 20 and above 60, with the class interval of 10. It was found that maximum number of respondents were in the age group of 20- 30 with 67 respondents, followed by 10- 20 with 60 respondents as represented in Table 1.

As per Table 2, the numbers of male respondents were 173 (62.5%) and the numbers of female respondents were 104 (37.5%). This shows that males participated the maximum in the study.

Table 3 shows the preferences about the celebrities in the advertisements. The respondents are categorized in three categories name yes, no and can’t say. The numbers of respondents who prefer the celebrities in the advertisements are 103 which contribute 37.2% of the responded population. Further, 96 respondents responded that they do not prefer celebrity in the advertisements which contribute to 34.7% of the responded population. 78 respondents replied can’t say which is 28.2% of the responded population.

• Null Hypothesis: There is no impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers.
• Alternate Hypothesis: There is impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers.

The null hypothesis indicates that there is no impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers, to test this hypothesis one-sample t-test is used, and as per the Table 4 the significance value is .000 which is significant at 5% level of significance. Hence the null hypothesis there is no impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers is rejected and alternate hypothesis there is impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers can be accepted.

ANOVA was used to identify the impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers. Here age group of rural consumers is considered as dependent variable whereas prefer celebrity in advertisement is considered as Construct. There is a significant impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers. The value of significance level is .000, which is significant at 5% level of significance. Therefore, it can be said that there is an impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers based on the data collected for the study.

CONCLUSION

The statistical tools were used to determine the conclusion of the hypotheses framed. The tools used for analysis of the data are- frequency distribution, which showed the percentage by which the hypotheses has been accepted, one- sample t-test to test the hypotheses at 5% of significance and ANOVA to analyze the impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers.

The following points were concluding observation to satisfy the objectives of the study and prove the hypotheses:

37.2% of the rural consumers prefer celebrities in the advertisements followed by 34.7% of rural consumers who do not prefer celebrities in the advertisements.

There is an impact of celebrity endorsement on rural consumers as it is been proven in the study by calculating the significance level.