Celebrity, Influencer, and Brand Endorsement: Processes and Effects

A celebrity is a well-known person who commands public recognition and fascination. Given the prevailing consumption culture, the celebrity often engages in brand endorsement practices, making celebrity endorsement (CE) a major advertising strategy. The major strands of CE research highlight key players: the celebrity, consumer, and endorsed brand. In addition to factors that can be traced directly to the celebrity (e.g., trustworthiness, attractiveness, images), CE research discusses how the celebrity’s match with a product or brand and how the celebrity’s relationship with consumers (both fans and the general public) offers important contingency factors that impact the effects of CE. The emergence of influencers in the 21st century gives rise to a new breed of celebrities on social media. Influencers are ordinary-people-turned-experts who specialize in an area of interest (e.g., lifestyle, food, travel). Without the traditional celebrity’s glamour, they use “authentic” and “similar” strategies in their self-branding efforts. They are passionate, sharing their personal brand usage experiences with and providing contextualized recommendations to consumers; and their relationship with consumers is characterized by trust, intimacy, and dialogue. These practices allow an influencer to address the consumer’s instrumental and relational needs when making purchase decisions, an act that a traditional celebrity is less effective in making happen. The celebrity and influencer illustrate the industry- and socially-constructed star-making processes, respectively. On the one hand, traditional celebrities’ path to fame is supported by networked media and the entertainment system. Influencers, on the other hand, create contents that netizens can pick and choose to like and follow, making their path to fame a socially- constructed process. The star-making industries in the 21st century are embracing big data, AI, and machine-learning algorithms as a new governance to “design” and “manufacture” celebrities. In so doing, they usher in an industry-constructed process that has the power and control at an unprecedented scale. The K-pop stars and virtual influencers thus created and managed have been successful. However, their path to fame raises concerns over institutional governance, regulatory control, and ethics of the celebrity and endorsement businesses as well as the means of cultural production. These issues together render celebrity studies and endorsement research a discipline both interesting and challenging to pursue.