A study on Celebrity endorsement as an effective tourism destination marketing tool with reference to Bangalore

A study on Celebrity endorsement as an effective tourism destination marketing tool with reference to Bangalore

Celebrity Endorsement is one of the major forms of advertising in which a business organisation makes use of famous individuals or well known organizations in order to boost consumer interest in the product and/or services that they want to sell. Now-a-days every company is trying to bring in a brand ambassador for their brands. Slowly the trend of tying up with a celebrity in promoting has moved towards promoting tourism destinations. This paper tries to find out the effect of celebrity endorsement as an effective marketing destination tool. The objectives framed to reach to this goal were to identify whether the consumers are consider the tourism advertisements that are endorsed by celebrities, to find out the various factors of celebrity endorsers that motivates people to visit the advertised tourist destination and to determine whether the use of celebrities have greater effect than the use of non celebrities when advertising a tourist destination. Data was collected from 250 respondents from Bangalore city in a questionnaire form. Some of the tools that are been used to test the hypothesis are One sample t- test, ANOVA, Chi Square test, Friedman test and Tukey test . The major findings from the study are that the main factors that a celebrity has to have when endorsing a tourism product is the match between the product and the celebrity and the factor that is not at all looked into by the consumers in a tourism product is physical attractiveness. It was also identified that most of the respondents would have better brand recognition and recall when done by a celebrity endorsement but more weightage for the advertisement, more convincing, easy to choose from the different destinations is only possible with the help of if the advertisement that are not done by celebrity. It was found out that occupation of the consumers would have no impact in getting attracted to celebrity endorsers but students were one category that loved to see celebrity endorsers on screen. Key words: Celebrity Endorsement, tourism destination advertisements, Expertise, Trustworthiness, Similarity, Familiarity, Likeability, Match between the celebrity, transfer meaning, Physical attractiveness.

Mary Jolly Rosma

Commerce