TO CONVERGE OR DIVERGE: THE EFFECT OF LOCALIZED CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA INTERACTIONS AND PERCEIVED BRAND LUXURY
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In fashion marketing, celebrity endorsement is a widely-used strategy to gain attention and produce positive brand knowledge (Carroll, 2009). Luxury brands use their social media accounts to post pictures of celebrity endorsers using their products. This is an effective strategy because celebrity endorsement posts could encourage fans of the celebrity to repost, like or comment on this post. This is beneficial for the brand because this results in more brand exposures. The question is how luxury brands can use celebrity endorsements successfully in the digital age. For example, should luxury brands localize the celebrity endorsement in social media? The dilemma of standardization and localization becomes very significant when luxury brands are facing a culturally different market (Liu et al., 2016). This paper examines the effectiveness of localized celebrity endorsements for luxury brands in Chinese social media based on an analysis of online big data and two experiments. First, a multi-level analysis of the posts of 33 luxury brands suggests that localized (Chinese) celebrity endorsers trigger more social media interactions than standardized (Western) celebrity endorsers. Next, the following experimental studies reveal that local endorsers do not enhance perceived brand luxury and individuals’ level of patriotism moderates the effect of localized (vs. standardized) celebrity endorsements on perceived brand luxury. For people with lower level of patriotism, localized celebrity endorsements reduce the perceived brand luxury. In contrast, for people with higher level of patriotism, localized celebrity endorsements lead to higher perceived brand luxury.