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An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this issue.
Introduction
Globally, the celebrity endorsement market is a multi-billion-dollar industry (Crutchfield, 2010). For instance, in the USA, celebrity endorsements are a popular advertising strategy, representing approximately 15 per cent of advertisements (Crutchfield, 2010; Hsu and McDonald, 2002). By linking celebrities with brands, advertisers imbue the endorsed brands with desirable associations (Keller, 2013; Till, 1998), with the expectation of developing favorable consumer-based brand equity (Keller, 1993). Although prior research investigates the impact of celebrity endorsers on brand recall (Kahle and Homer, 1985), endorsed brand attitudes (Till et al. , 2008) and purchase intentions (Kahle and Homer, 1985), scholarly research into the effects of celebrity endorsers on brand equity remains limited (Seno and Lukas, 2007). Given the high costs involved in hiring celebrity endorsers, it is imperative for marketing and advertising managers to establish a link between endorser qualities and endorsed brand equity to justify the funds allocated to celebrity advertising. Therefore, our first objective is to empirically assess the impact of celebrity endorsements on consumer-based brand equity, specifically the perceived credibility of the celebrity endorser.
Celebrities are considered as an embodiment of personality- and lifestyle-related meanings (McCracken, 1989). Consumers value the symbolic meanings associated with celebrities and use these meanings, in part, to craft an individual sense of self (McCracken, 1989). Despite the theoretical understanding of meaning movement in celebrity brand endorsement and the potential impact on consumer self-concept, as highlighted by McCracken (1989), empirical investigations of these relationships are minimal. In accordance with McCracken's view, we expect consumers to address self-definitional needs through the celebrity endorsement. Our second objective is to empirically examine the effect of celebrity endorsements on consumer self-brand connection. Self-brand connection is an emergent concept, which reflects the formation of strong and meaningful ties between brands and consumer self-identity (Escalas, 2004; Kemp et al. , 2012). Moreover, given the well-documented role of "self" in governing consumer behavior (Belk, 1988; Sirgy, 1982), the development of self-brand connection potentially serves as an additional pathway to the development of endorsed brand equity.
The effects of celebrity endorsers on consumers' brand behavior have been found to be dependent upon the extent to which consumers perceive a celebrity-brand pairing as...