The Appeal of Moderate Incongruence: Investigating the 1 Impact of Product-Celebrity Mismatch on Consumer Intentions

Brands constantly use celebrities for their endorsements. However, which celebrity to choose is a crucial issue for the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Extant research, focused on the "match-up hypothesis”, which suggests a perfect match between the brand and the endorser on several dimensions, among which the attractivity dimension is particularly recurring, has recently been challenged as a result of multiple doubts about its real impact. This study provides new insights showing that a maximum level of congruence is not always optimal for brands, as other factors, such as the category of the brand or the advertising format, can impact this choice. A 2x2x2 between-subjects design experiment involving 417 participants revealed that a “moderate mismatch” in the attractiveness between product and celebrity positively affects purchase intention more than a perfect match between product and celebrity. The effect is fully mediated by attitude toward the advertising, whose relationship with fit between the product and the celebrity is negatively moderated by whether the product belongs to a luxury vs. non-luxury brand (irrespective of the adv format utilized). This study advances extant knowledge in celebrity endorsements literature bringing to light new evidence related to choosing the “right” celebrity and the factors that should guide the choice and opens new avenues of investigations on the development of unifying theories on the “match-up” factor and its application into other domains (e.g. influencer marketing). Furthermore, it offers novel insights to marketers interested in utilizing endorsers in their advertising and in optimizing the choice of celebrities by organizations based on the fit with the product