Exploring Facets of Spokesperson Effectiveness in B2B Advertising: What Works and What doesn’t? An Abstract

In a world of information-laden and feature-based marketing communications in business-to-business (B2B) marketing (Baack et al. 2016; Brown et al. 2011), some firms have resorted to the use of celebrities with the expectation that the endorsement coming from such public figures would help in catching the attention of the purchasers away from the competition (Canning and West 2006). The success of the branding campaign carried out by Accenture, with Tiger Woods, has brought celebrity endorsement in the spotlight. The situation is similar in developing nations like India, where actors Amitabh Bachchan and Mithun Chakraborty endorse the cement brand Binani and GoDaddy, respectively. Based on this premise, the present study investigates the following question: whether having a spokesperson would be a better advertising strategy than a generic ad? If yes, would it be better to have a celebrity spokesperson or a company employee? In addition, the present study also explores the conditions that may govern the choice of the spokesperson. To this end, three controlled experiments were conducted using fictitious advertisements (with a combined sample size of around 500) with industry executives in charge of purchases. In the three studies, we tried to investigate the relative effectiveness of a celebrity spokesperson vis-à-vis an employee spokesperson under different buying situations (study 1); with different levels of buyer attitudes (study 2) and at different levels of buyer empowerment (study 3). The data were analysed using MANOVA and ANOVA. Major findings indicate that a spokesperson would be a better choice than a generic ad. However, we find a celebrity spokesperson to be more effective in the following cases: (a) a low involvement product; (b) when buyer scepticism towards advertisements is low; and (c) when perceived empowerment of the buyer is high. The findings emphasize on the role of the spokesperson in B2B advertising and add a novel contribution to theory. This study opens up henceforth unexplored avenues for B2B marketing managers.