Celebrity Endorsement on Consumer Purchase Intention for Milk Powder Market, Sri Lanka

Abstract

An organization may have developed excellent products with exceptional attributes, but ultimately success hinges on the capability of persuading a significant number of customers to select that company’s products or services from other rivals. Celebrity Endorsement can be recognized as one of the extensively used communication strategies by the companies in their plans for sustaining and outperforming in the industry. Milk powder market in Sri Lanka can be identified as a market in which the competitors engage in a monopolistic competition in order to gain and secure their market position within the industry. As their core product consists with the generic attributes and the benefits (although it brings different tastes, flavor, color and smell), in order to be differentiated, their core product is positioned under different qualities, nutrients and physiognomies which a particular consumer segment receives after consuming the specific product. With the need of such positioning, the companies urge to communicate the perceptual picture of the brand through popular characters (celebrities) in the country. Currently, in Sri Lankan context, celebrities are identified as one of the prominent communication models who can make a significant influence on the consumer purchase intention. With a popular celebrity endorsement, the organisations also expect a similar popularity for their respective brand and products. Not only the popularity of the celebrity, but also the complementary qualities, talents, competencies, features and the capabilities of the celebrity has to be matched with the brand features and it has been widely advertised and communicate through mass media, social media as well as through digital media. Selection of inappropriate celebrity and the effort of matching their personal qualities with the brand qualities have made the milk powder market players more competitive and as a result of that, it can be seen multiple celebrity endorsers have represented the similar brand within a short period of time. That will lead to create some confusions in the consumers mind and this will make long term harmful effects for the brand equity that cannot be recover under a huge cost. In such a scenario, the organisations should be very careful in selecting and matching the most appropriate celebrity endorser to representing for their respective brand. Accordingly, the purpose of the current study is to identify the extent to which the Celebrity Endorsement makes impact on customer purchase intention with special reference to milk powder market in Sri Lanka. As for the population, it has identified the people who purchase and consume milk powders normally. The research consists one key objective and five specific objectives. The impact made by the five main independent variables: Trustworthiness, Expertness, Attractiveness, Respect and Similarity (TEARS-Model) on the dependent variable: Purchase Intention was measured and five hypotheses were developed for the study. With the use of convenience sampling method, a sample of respondents was selected for the study. As the main data collection instrument, self-administered questionnaires were distributed among 400 respondents and 368 active responses could be taken for the analysis. Descriptive statistics was used to analyse data and it exposes that, there’s an impact of Celebrity Endorsement on Purchase Intention of customers in milk powder market. Moreover, it reveals that, Trustworthiness and the Attractiveness of the celebrity have a significant and strong influence over the purchase intention while it displays a moderate influence from Expertness and Respect of the celebrity endorser to the purchase intention. The overall study findings make a significant contribution for the existing literature of celebrity endorsement where it provides valuable up-to-date managerial implications for the milk powder market in Sri Lanka.