Standby or Breakup? How Brands in China Respond When Celebrity Endorsers Get Involved in Scandals

DOI

10.2991/aebmr.k.191217.041How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Celebrity endorsement, Crisis communication, Social legitimacy, Legal legitimacy, Internal attribution, External Attribution, Response strategy

Abstract

Celebrity endorsement, a common strategy used in marketing and advertising is a double-edged sword for brands. The established association with celebrity endorsers can bring not only desirable potentials to brands but also crisis when endorsers get involved in scandals. Current literature on this type of crisis lacks focuses on Chinese culture context, analysis of response strategy, and empirical research design. To fill these gaps, this paper adopts case study and content analysis to investigate four influential scandals happened last year in China and the crisis management strategies of affected brands. Comments and reposts of nine Sina Weibo posts were collected for analysis. Five of them are the official responding posts of involved celebrities, while the other four are posts of affected brands. Findings support that in China social legitimacy violation and internal attribution of crisis responsibility will cause a more negative influence on the celebrity endorser’s reputation than legal legitimacy violation and external attribution of crisis responsibility, respectively. Brands shall determine whether to terminate the endorsement contract or not according to public attitude towards the scandal. Contrary to other suggestions, this research demonstrates that brands can use “silence strategy” to manage celebrity endorsement crisis.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jiaqi Liu
PY  - 2019
DA  - 2019/12/20
TI  - Standby or Breakup? How Brands in China Respond When Celebrity Endorsers Get Involved in Scandals
BT  - Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Economic Management and Cultural Industry (ICEMCI 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 218
EP  - 230
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/aebmr.k.191217.041
DO  - 10.2991/aebmr.k.191217.041
ID  - Liu2019
ER  -