Exploring the impact of celebrity endorsement and product class involvement on advertising effectiveness: an eye tracking approach

Celebrity endorsement has increased in popularity over the past decades and companies are willing to spend increasingly excessive amounts of money into it. Even though multiple studies support celebrity endorsement, further research on its impact on advertising effectiveness is called for. Fur-ther, the role of consumers’ product class involvement in advertising needs to be further studied. The purpose of this study is to explore if consumers’ product class involvement and exposure to celebrity endorsers affect consumers brand recall. Supported by earlier studies, brand recall was used as a measure for advertising effectiveness in this study. In general, a psychological approach was chosen for building the theoretical framework. Concept of classical conditioning was presented in order to understand why people act how they do. Balanced theory and meaning transfer model were presented in order to study how celebrities can be used effectively in advertising context. Further, the importance of product class involvement in advertising effectiveness was evaluated. Hypotheses were formulated based on a literature review of the existing research. Because of the versatility of the research design, a mixed methods approach for this study was adopted. Empirical part of the study was conducted in three stages. First, a pre-test was conducted in order to choose suitable product endorsers for the advertisement stimuli used in the experiment. Second, an eye-tracking experiment with 30 test subjects was conducted in order to study how people view advertisements and whether the familiarity of the product endorser and consumers’ product class involvement affects brand recall. For the experiment, a fictional brand was created in order to avoid bias on brand recall. Third, qualitative interviews for 15 test subjects were conducted in the post-experiment stage in order to gain deeper understating of the phenomenon and to make sense of the findings from the experiment. Findings from this study support celebrity endorsement by suggesting that a famous spokesperson does not steal attention from brand information more than a non-celebrity product endorser. As a result, the use of a celebrity endorser did not decrease brand recall. Results support earlier research as consumer’ higher product class involvement resulted in a better brand recall. Findings from the interviews suggest that consumers have positive perceptions of celebrity endorsement in general. However, the celebrity–brand congruence is a crucial factor when creating attitudes towards the advertisement. Future research ideas were presented based on the limitations and results of this study

What's new pussycat? A genealogy of animal celebrity

Animal celebrity is a human creation informing us about our socially constructed natural world. It is relational, expressive of cultural proclivities, political power plays and the quotidian everyday, as well as serious philosophical reflections on the meaning of being human. This article attempts to outline some key contours in the genealogy of animal celebrity, showing how popular culture, including fairground attractions, public relations, Hollywood movies, documentary films, zoo attractions, commercial sport and mediatised moral panics - particularly those accompanying scientific developments such as cloning - help to order, categorise and license aspects of human understanding and feelings. The nature of [animal] charisma and celebrity are explored with assistance from Jumbo the Elephant, Guy the Gorilla, Paul the clairvoyant octopus, Uggie the film star, Nénette the orang-utan and Dolly the sheep. It argues that the issue of what it is to be human lies beneath the celebritised surface or, as Donna Haraway noted, the issue 'of having to face oneself'. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Cultural meaning of quality of life: perspectives of Brazilian burn patients

Purpose. This study was designed to explore the cultural meaning and dimensions of quality of life from the perspective of Brazilian burn patients. Method. A qualitative research approach was used. Nineteen burn patients and their close relatives participated in this ethnographic study. Data were collected by means of direct observation and semi-structured interviews, conducted in a hospital outpatient clinic and during visits to patients` homes. The following inter-related phases guided the analysis process: reading of the material and data reduction, data display, conclusion outlining and verification. Results. Participants reported that the quality of life is related to autonomy and the ability to work. The dimensions of quality of life included: resuming work and functional ability, body image, having leisure and interpersonal relationships. Their descriptions revealed their feelings and attitudes about resuming their previous activities and social lives, particularly concerning the work. Conclusion. For burn patients, quality of life is associated with the concept of normality, the satisfactory performance of social roles in the context of family life and the social world. The results showed the importance of the sociocultural dimension in the concept of quality of life for persons undergoing burn rehabilitation.

Clifford Geertz, 1926-2006: Meaning, method, and Indonesian economic history

Clifford Geertz was best known for his pioneering excursions into symbolic or interpretive anthropology, especially in relation to Indonesia. Less well recognised are his stimulating explorations of the modern economic history of Indonesia. His thinking on the interplay of economics and culture was most fully and vigorously expounded in Agricultural Involution. That book deployed a succinctly packaged past in order to solve a pressing contemporary puzzle, Java's enduring rural poverty and apparent social immobility. Initially greeted with acclaim, later and ironically the book stimulated the deep and multi-layered research that in fact led to the eventual rejection of Geertz's central contentions. But the veracity or otherwise of Geertz's inventive characterisation of Indonesian economic development now seems irrelevant; what is profoundly important is the extraordinary stimulus he gave to a generation of scholars to explore Indonesia's modern economic history with a depth and intensity previously unimaginable.

What Is the Meaning of Homocysteine in Patients on Dialysis?

Objective: To evaluate the determinants of total plasma homocysteine levels and their relations with nutritional parameters, inflammatory status, and traditional risk factors for cardiovascular disease in renal failure patients on dialysis treatment. Design: The study was conducted on 70 clinically stable patients, 50 of them on hemodialysis (70% men; 55.3 +/- 14.5 years) and 20 on peritoneal dialysis (50% men; 62 +/- 13.7 years). Patients were analyzed in terms of biochemical parameters (serum lipids, creatinine, homocysteine [Hcy], creatine-kinase [Ck], folic acid, and vitamin B(12)), anthropometric data, markers of inflammatory status (tumor necrosis factor-alpha, C-reactive protein, interleukin-6), and adapted subjective global assessment. Results: The total prevalence of hyperhomocysteinemia (>15 mu mol/L) was 85.7%. Plasma folic acid and plasma vitamin B(12) were within the normal range. Multiple regression analysis (r(2) - 0.20) revealed that the determinants of total Hcy were type of dialysis, creatinine, Ck, folic acid, and total cholesterol. Hcy was positively correlated with albumin and creatinine and negatively correlated with total cholesterol, high density lipoprotein cholesterol, folic acid, and vitamin B(12). Conclusions: The determinants of total Hcy in the study sample were type of dialysis, creatinine, Ck, folic acid, and total cholesterol. Evidently, the small sample size might have had an effect on the statistical analyses and further studies are needed. However, Hcy in patients on dialysis treatment may not have the same effect as observed in the general population. In this respect, the association between malnutrition and inflammation may be a confounding factor in the determination of the true relationship between Hcy, nutritional status, and cardiovascular risk factors in this group. (C) 2011 by the National Kidney Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved.