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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the dominance of athlete endorser characteristics (i.e. moral character vs warmth) on athlete endorser perception and the influence of tarnished athlete endorsers (i.e. immoral character vs coldness) on brand evaluations from the perspectives of perceiver characteristics, including dispositional tendency, innate moral intuitions, and self-location (SL).

This research consists of three experimental studies with 135, 72, and 91 participants, respectively. Study 1 compared the dominance of moral character and warmth on athlete endorser perception. Study 2 examined the impact of perceiver characteristics on the cause-and-effect relationship between tarnished athlete endorsers (i.e. immoral character vs coldness) and brand evaluations. Study 3 investigated the cross-cultural generalizability of the US-based research findings in Study 2 for Indians.

Moral character is more influential than warmth on athlete endorser evaluations. Tarnished athlete endorsers with immoral character exert more negative influence than tarnished athlete endorsers with coldness characteristic on brand evaluations. Except for dispositional tendency, innate moral intuitions and SL moderate brand evaluations. Endorser and perceiver characteristics yield asymmetric patterns of influence on Americans’ and Indians’ brand evaluations.

Future research is needed to verify the causal effects of thinking styles on the relationship between tarnished athlete endorsers and brand evaluations.

The determination of endorsement continuity has to jointly consider the characteristics of endorsers, perceivers, and cultures.

This research contributes to the endorsement research by advancing the research scopes of athlete endorser, perceiver, and culture characteristics.

Endorsement deals are a key contributing factor for companies to gain brand recognition and positive brand associations from consumers. However, endorsement relationships can be risky for firms in the event of an endorser’s bad behavior or involvement in scandals. The purpose of this paper is to examine how brands can use endorsement exit strategies to minimize and even benefit from negative situations involving its endorser.

After a review of celebrity endorsement literature, the paper investigates the Rio Olympic Games robbery scandal involving American swimmer Ryan Lochte as a detailed case. By studying the timeline of sponsor-related activities, relevant theories and brand outcomes through Google Trends, indications of a calculated and strategic exit from the endorsement relationship emerge.

The case analysis establishes that sponsors can successfully leverage the negative associations toward a disgraced endorser. Based on the process of meaning transfer, this case proposes that sponsors can benefit from its public dissociation from the endorser and gain awareness from this separation.

This paper is the first study to examine the positive impact of a celebrity endorsement scandal. It highlights the need for managers to actively prepare endorsement exit strategies in the event of negative associations or endorser actions. The timing and scope of the exit strategy can both limit negative meaning transfer, and leverage the situation creating positive perceptions of integrity and ethics for the sponsor.

The use of celebrities, and particularly athletes, to influence consumers and sell products is not a new practice, but one that is gaining considerable steam in the sports marketplace. However, many academics and practitioners have long questioned the means by which celebrity endorsement is measured and evaluated. Through the use of validated surveys among US students and the inauguration of the Celebrity-Hero Matrix (CHM), some of their questions are answered. Being labelled a 'heroic' athlete does, it seems, have tremendous power for marketers, and provides endorsement clout for the athlete.

Past integrated marketing communications (IMC) frameworks have established brand contacts as important sources of information and feedback. This paper aims to discuss how the presence of multiple brand stakeholders and the proliferation of digital media increase the amount of brand information generated exponentially. When a firm fails to harness this information, it risks misalignment between brand identity and brand image, which, in turn, tarnishes brand-equity.

Past IMC frameworks are reviewed and extended to identify specific brand contact points between multiple stakeholders that hold significant potential to dynamically reconfigure brand identity. Theoretical propositions regarding the IMC function’s role in managing these contact points to generate brand-equity are offered.

The brand contacts described and their successful integration into a firm’s brand-equity strategy extend current IMC-based brand-equity models and suggest fruitful, novel avenues for creating brand-equity. Further, these brand contacts offer practical examples of how the scope of marketing communications can be redefined.

This paper contributes to the body of research on the elevation of IMC to a strategic level function. In addition to the synergistic communication of the brand offering, IMC needs to play a pivotal role in coordinating the contacts between the brand and stakeholders, and in extrapolating relevant brand insights from these contacts.

This paper aims to explore the characteristics of a brand spokesperson’s voice that are the most valuable for consumer-based brand equity (CBBE) and evaluates various explanations in previous research regarding the influences of a speaker’s voice.

Brand identities can transfer their associations and affect as well as influence brand recall, thus contributing to CBBE. In addition, the pitch and gender of a speaker’s voice are considered as key characteristics of voice perception. This experimental study exposed 521 respondents to 12 different voices and measured the effects of a spokesperson’s voice pitch and gender on associations, attitude toward the voice and brand recall.

This study presents a model that explains the influence of a brand spokesperson’s voice on CBBE. The findings show that low-pitched voices induced distinctive, positive associations and led to a more positive attitude toward the voice and greater brand recall, regardless of the gender of the spokesperson and that of the respondent. Moreover, voice associations partially mediated the effects on attitude toward the voice and completely mediated the effects on brand recall.

While numerous brands have resorted to specific voices to represent themselves, brand spokesperson’s voice and its associations have not been studied. This study highlights the importance of a spokesperson’s voice pitch and its associations in building CBBE and nuances the roles of spokespersons’ and respondents’ gender.

The use of celebrity endorsers in advertising is wide‐spread – as much as 20 percent of all advertising use some type of celebrity endorser. Marketers invest significant dollars in securing the promotional support of well‐known individuals. Associative learning principles are presented as a useful framework for understanding how celebrity endorsers can be used more effectively. Principles such as repetition, overshadowing, blocking, belongingness, CS pre‐exposure, association set size, and extinction are introduced and linked to specific managerial suggestions for improving the use of celebrity endorsers.

This paper examines the impact of celebrity endorsement on Malaysian consumers' behavioural intentions. Source attractiveness, source credibility and the fit between the endorser and the endorsed product are discussed and examined. An empirical study is carried out which uses stimulus materials that involve a sport shoe brand and a fitness centre. The dataset is analysed using a series of multivariate analyses and a model subsequently constructed using structural equation modelling. The findings indicated that source attractiveness and credibility are essential for celebrity endorsement effectiveness. However, the fit between the endorser and the product is not found to be significant. Nonetheless, this fit has an indirect effect on consumers' behavioural intentions, via the shared variances with source attractiveness and credibility.

The purpose of this paper is to test empirically the impact of negative information about a celebrity spokesperson on consumers' perceptions of the endorsed brand. In addition, it is the first study to examine the reverse relationship: the impact of negative information about the brand on the celebrity endorser.

A two‐group, post‐test‐only, randomized experimental design was utilized to test the hypotheses. Data were collected by a survey of 247 college students.

The results of an experiment indicate that when respondents are exposed to negative information about a celebrity endorser, a negative transference of affect in the endorsement relationship will occur. However, when the situation is reversed and the respondents are exposed to negative information about the brand, the transference of affect is mitigated.

The present study provides a starting‐point for further research on negative information transference in the celebrity endorsement relationship.

It is crucial that retailers be aware of the risks associated with using celebrities to endorse their stores and products. Given that these results provide tentative support for the commonly held belief that a decline in the celebrity's image can impact the image of the brand, it is important that retailers carefully choose an endorser who currently has a good image and will likely be able to uphold this image in the future.

The paper introduces and empirically examines one explanation of how negative information may impact the celebrity advertising process.

The purpose of this paper is to extend previous research into sport celebrity endorsements by investigating such endorsements of products ultimately sold by retailers. This is done by updating previous research involving print media in sporting magazines.

A content analysis approach is used, examining advertisements in randomly selected issues of sports illustrated from the most recent full six years of publication.

Changes in the frequency of advertisements using sports celebrities were found compared to previous studies. Additionally, it appears that products which are ultimately sold by retailers are endorsed more frequently by celebrities in certain sports than others.

By including in the investigation the topics of sport played and consumer products, the paper extends the current literature to explore the advertisers' use of athlete endorsers with products directly and indirectly impacting retailers.

In the context of celebrity endorsement, this study aims to demonstrate that the ways in which consumers adopt moral reasoning strategies (i.e. rationalization, decoupling and coupling) are largely dependent on the severity (i.e. high vs low) of celebrity transgressions and the degree to which they personally identify with the celebrity.

A between-subjects online experiment (N = 144) with two conditions, representing high- and low-severity celebrity transgressions, was conducted. Participants’ attitudes toward the celebrity and endorsed brand, their purchase intention for the endorsed product and the degrees to which they identified with the celebrity and adopted the three types of moral reasoning strategies were assessed.

The rationalization and decoupling strategies mediate the effects of highly negative information about a celebrity on consumer attitudes toward the celebrity and endorsed brand as well as on purchase intention for the endorsed product. In addition, consumers who identify strongly as fans of the celebrity in question are more likely to activate rationalization and decoupling strategies to process and evaluate transgressive behaviors than those with weaker fan identification.

By exploring the ways in which moral reasoning and fan identification work in processing negative information, this study provides insights into the psychological process through which negative news coverage of a celebrity endorser influences consumer attitudes and purchase intention.