Celebrity Spokespersons

We’ve all seen and heard them on television—celebrity spokespersons appearing in person or as voiceovers in commercials to promote everything from financial services to cosmetics to cars.

UAccording to a Rice marketing researcher, advertisers who rely on celebrity endorsements to promote their products may want to consider simply using the star’s voice. Besides being considerably less expensive, celebrity voiceovers are potentially just as effective—even when the consumer doesn’t recognize the celebrity’s voice. In fact, voiceovers appear to work better when we have a positive recognition of the voice but cannot name the celebrity to whom it belongs.

Andrew Perkins, assistant professor of marketing at Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, and Mark Forehand, associate professor of marketing at the University of Washington Business School, examined the effectiveness of unidentified celebrity voiceovers and how such product endorsements may influence consumers’ attitudes toward the brand. In assessing the influence of celebrity voiceovers on consumers, Perkins and Forehand administered a series of questionnaires and the implicit association tests (IAT) to 232 undergraduates. The IAT is a computer-based categorization task that measures the strength of association between concepts in memory.

Initially, the researchers established the subjects’ familiarity with and positive attitudes toward several celebrities, including those used in voiceovers. They also verified that the subjects saw no strong match or mismatch between the celebrities and the brands they endorsed. The study was conducted in three phases during which time the subjects viewed six, 30-second voiceover advertisements. The celebrities who provided the voiceovers were never visually present or explicitly acknowledged.

“Our results suggest that advertising elements like celebrity voiceovers can influence brand attitude independent of any conscious awareness on the part of consumers,” Perkins says. One particular finding underscored the researchers’ conclusions. Subjects who were unable to identify the celebrity voice after viewing an ad still reported an increase in their positive attitude toward the brand. Perkins believes this occurred because the subjects unconsciously activated their positive feelings about the celebrity from their memory. According to Perkins, such unconscious processing by consumers causes their attitude about the celebrity to be mapped onto their attitude about the brand.

“On the other hand,” says Perkins, “for those subjects who recognized the celebrity voice in the ad and therefore were more conscious of the celebrity connection, we found a negative relationship between celebrity and brand attitude.” He explains that when consumers are presented directly with information they believe is irrelevant to their decision about a product, they tend consciously to ignore that information and not let it bias their brand attitude. “The subjects in our study who recognized the celebrity from the voiceover,” Perkins says, “were consciously able to separate their feelings about the celebrity from their attitudes toward the brand.”

The researchers’ study, titled “Implicit Assimilation and Explicit Contrast: The Unconscious Effects of Celebrity Voiceovers on Brand Attitude,” was published in the Journal of Consumer Research.