Extending the Match-Up Hypothesis in Celebrity Advertising: The Effects of Celebrity and Product Incongruity and a Moderating Role of Consumers’ Optimum Stimulation Level

Abstract

The conventional wisdom of celebrity advertising, the so-called the match-up hypothesis that suggests a match or fit between celebrity and product as a crucial factor in creating an effective celebrity advertisement, was critically re-examined in this paper. An alternative hypothesis based on Mandler’s (1982) model, which predicts an inverted U-shaped relationship between different levels of match/mismatch and evaluations of advertisement, was considered as another possibility. These two alternative predictions were, then, incorporated into a generalized framework of celebrity advertising by using individual differences in Optimum Stimulation Level (i.e., each individual’s preferred level of environmental stimulation) as a moderating factor.

The results of this study confirmed the proposed framework. It was found that subjects with high OSL showed the response pattern suggested by Mandler’s model, whereas subjects with low OSL showed the response pattern suggested by the match-up hypothesis. That is, subjects with high OSL preferred the moderately mismatched advertisement between celebrity and product to the matched and the extremely mismatched advertisements. On the other hand, subjects with low OSL showed a tendency of preferring the matched advertisement to the mismatched advertisements.