Exploring the Concept of Celebrity Brands Amongst College Students

For more than 150 years, celebrities have been used by companies to endorse products. Today celebrities appear in approximately 20 % of advertisements in the United States (Solomon 2009). Using celebrities as endorsers in advertising is not a new concept. In recent years, however, there has been ambiguity between the celebrity as a person and the celebrity as a marketable brand. Thus, the result is the concept known as “celebrity brands,” which has been coined by pop culture, but relatively ignored in academic research. The purpose of this work is to expand the knowledge of celebrities as more than endorsers and to identify and understand conceptually how consumers perceive celebrity brands. More specifically, this work addresses the following research questions: (1) how do consumers define celebrity brands; (2) what positive associations do consumers have about celebrity brands; and (3) what negative associations do consumers about celebrity brands. To address these research questions the authors conducted an exploratory study.