The effect of celebrity endorsement on customers' attitudes, emotional, value and purchase intention toward a footwear brand
Abstract
As one of smaller players in leather footwear industry, Biti’s, a local manufacturer in Vietnam, faces fierce competition from many giants with global brand names such as Nike, Adidas, Puma and so forth. Biti’s has implemented a successful marketing strategy to build up its brand, made differentiated products, and attracted more customers. Specifically, the company has signed a celebrity, Son Tung MTP, to endorse its brand’s endorsement contract. This paper aims to exploit Biti’s successful business case by developing an endorsement model to test the causal relationship between consumers’ attitudes, perceived quality, brand attitude, emotional value, and purchase intention of Biti’s footwear. By using structural equation model approach to analyze a questionnaire survey of 328 correspondents, the findings revealed that a sub-factor of expertise was dropped out of the second-order construct of consumers’ attitude of endorser. All hypothesized tests were statistically supported at the 0.001 or 0.05 level. The results also provide managerial implications related to how local manufacturers adopt a celebrity endorsement strategy, nourish consumers’ attitude, and create emotional value for attracting and retaining customers and increase market share.
Keywords: celebrity endorsement, brand attitude, emotional value, purchase intention.