Celebrity endorsers in cross-cultural marketing communications

Almost 95% of advertising budgets are spend persuading celebrities, like George Clooney or Angelina Jolie to recommend a certain product. Several theories explain why such persuasive means 'work'. Celebrities should be attractive, trustworthy, competent, loveable and the like. Much effort has been devoted to find out the ideal relation 'celebrity type - product type'. If George Clooney 'works' for Nescafe, can you also 'use' him to recommend some brand of car, or chocolate, or after shave, or clothing? Another issue pertains to cultural differences. Whereas Dutch recipients of advertising messages are best persuaded by competent celebrities (Louis van Gaal recommending a managerial course), French viewers especially like beauty and elegance. However, many questions in this field still await to be addressed. In this project, participants design and test various variants of the same advertising message and test its persuasive effectiveness of recipients from different cultures.