It Is a Match: The Impact of Congruence between Celebrity Image and Consumer Ideal Self on Endorsement Effectiveness

ABSTRACT Using celebrities for promoting products is a popular advertising strategy. The selection of celebrity endorsers is of great concern to advertisers given the large sums of money to secure their participation. To date, most academic research on celebrity endorser effectiveness has focused on endorser characteristics (e.g., source credibility) or a match between a product and the endorser (e.g., match‐up hypothesis). The study presented here introduces a new dimension for understanding celebrity endorser effects, the congruence between a consumer's perception of a celebrity's personality characteristics with the consumer's self‐concept. Consumers’ self‐concept is an important influence on purchase…