Abstract:
Advertising and marketing managers spend a great deal of money to have celebrities endorse their
product. Some view it to be an effective form of advertising as evidenced by the number of celebrityendorsed
advertisements that have increased. Despite numerous amounts of research on celebrities
endorsing a single product, little research has been conducted regarding the use of multiple-celebrity
endorsements in advertising. This study is based on the research by Hsu and McDonald (2002), who
documented the use of multiple-celebrity endorsement advertising in the milk moustache campaign in
the USA. This study investigated the tendency towards correspondence inference of 200 respondents
and researched their attitudes towards celebrities, the product being advertised, and the advertisement
as a whole. The main findings are that there is a significant correlation between correspondence
inference and attitudes towards the celebrity, but suggests that the levels of correspondence inference
between the paid and unpaid situations depend on the celebrity. Implications are that marketers need to
realise that correspondence inference might have an influence on people’s attitudes towards the
celebrity who endorses the product.
