The impact of celebrity-advertising context congruence on the effectiveness of brand image transfer

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of celebrity-advertising context congruence on transferring a celebrity’s image to a brand image.

This study investigates the effect of the advertising context, which is the background of the ad provided by the vehicle carrying it, in transferring a celebrity athlete’s image.

The results indicate that the presentation of a celebrity athlete in an advertising context that is congruent with the professional expertise of the athlete enables the more effective transfer of the athlete’s image to the brand’s image compared with the incongruent advertising context. In addition, the findings suggest that image attributes perceived as belonging to the professional expertise of an athlete are transferred more effectively by a context-congruent advertisement, while image attributes based on the sociocultural influence of an athlete show no difference in image transfer based on the advertising context.

Although the advertising context has been thought to influence advertising effectiveness, no specific research has thus far analyzed the relationship between image transfer and the advertising context in the sports marketing literature.