Marketing communications with celebrities, social media influencers and experts as brand endorsers are increasingly gaining importance among large number of companies. Brand endorsers enable brands to achieve various goals, one of the key ones being influence on the consumers’ purchase decisions. Important part of achieving this goal is establishing consumers’ trust in brand endorsers. Literature overview shows that along trust other characteristics of brand endorsers also play an important part in the effectiveness of brand endorsements – key characteristics are familiarity, likeability, expertness and identification. For this reason, the focus of quantitative research was on studying the impact of selected characteristics on trust and purchase decisions. Furthermore, I proposed an alternative model that examines the impact of endorsers' characteristics on identification. Analysis was further on focused on identifying potential differences between different types of brand endorsers that have not been thoroughly researched until now. The empirical research shows that chosen characteristics effect trust in brand endorsers, identification with them and purchase intentions of endorsed product, with trust and identification having strongest influence on purchase intentions. The results of my study showed that when studying brand endorsements, it is necessary to also consider the hierarchy of effects which offers additional insight into understanding impact of endorsers on consumers’ behavior at different levels. Study also shows that there are no major discrepancies between different types of brand endorsers, difference is only shown in few places.
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