Abstract

How do consumers adjust their public and private self-expression through a brand when an endorser attached to the brand gets involved in a scandal? Building on the theory of meaning transfer and congruity theory, the authors propose and demonstrate that in contrast to the extant literature, negative meaning transfer prevails over the high self-brand congruity barriers that managers attempt to build by employing endorsers to transfer positive meanings to their brands. Using three pre-studies and three experiments involving fictitious and real-life celebrities, the authors demonstrate that the effect of negative meaning transfer on consumers’ self-expression in public and private domain and brand attitude becomes more prominent with increasing self-brand congruity and endorser-self congruity. Additionally, negative meaning transfer becomes more pronounced for a celebrity endorser compared to an expert and a celebrity-expert combined endorser. The findings offer novel implications for endorser selection and meaning transfer for marketing campaigns and brand management.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2021.2016267 .

摘要

当依附品牌的代言人卷入丑闻时，消费者如何通过品牌调整自己的公共和私人自我表达？基于意义转移理论和一致性理论，作者提出并证明，与现有文献相比，消极意义转移胜过管理者试图通过雇佣代言人将积极意义转移给他们的自我品牌一致性障碍。品牌。通过三个预研究和三个涉及虚构和现实生活名人的实验，作者证明了负面意义转移对消费者在公共和私人领域的自我表达和品牌态度的影响随着自我品牌一致性和品牌态度的增加而变得更加突出。背书者自我一致性。此外，与专家和名人专家组合的代言人相比，名人代言人的负面意义转移变得更加明显。这些发现为营销活动和品牌管理的代言人选择和意义转移提供了新的启示。

本文的补充数据可在 https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2021.2016267 在线获取。