The Social Influence in Celebrity Endorsed Promotions: Revisiting the Consumer Perspective

Abstract The extant literature on celebrity endorsements lacks the multidimensional approach for evaluating the effectiveness of promotion. Also the role of social influence in celebrity endorsements and promotion effectiveness is yet to be explored. To fill this literature gap this study adopts a multi-dimensional approach to evaluate the factors that affect the endorsement effectiveness. The Partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) applied on data collected from 409 respondents revealed that social influence and endorser identification substantially and positively affects the individual’s purchase intentions, attitude, celebrity attachment, and perceived celebrity credibility. The theoretical framework used in this study empirically validates the role of social influence in arbitrating the efficacy of celebrity endorsement and purchase intention for the first time to the researcher’s best knowledge. The findings are vital to the marketing managers to create an appropriate promotion strategy. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.