가상공간의 활성화에 따라 아바타와 같이 사람을 대신하는 대리인(agent)의 사용이 활성화되었으나, 인공물이 사람 과 유사해질수록 불편함을 느끼는 언캐니밸리(uncanny valley) 현상이 장애물로 작용하고 있다. 본 연구에서는 연예인 에 기반을 둔 아바타에서 느껴지는 언캐니밸리 현상을 확인하고자 하였다. 연예인 및 일반인의 사진과 그 사진을 기반 으로 제작된 아바타에서 눈 크기를 조절하여 비전형성 정도를 조작하였고, 이에 따른 언캐니밸리 현상의 강도를 측정하 였다. 그 결과, 사진과 아바타 모두에서 연예인 얼굴에 대한 언캐니밸리 현상이 더 강하게 나타났다. 이는 친숙한 얼굴 에 대해서 더 강한 얼굴 표상이 형성되어 얼굴 변화에 대해 더 쉽게 탐지한다는 기존의 발견들과 일치한다. 한편 사진 자극에 대해서는 기존의 연구에서처럼 비전형성 정도가 높아질수록 더 높은 언캐니밸리 현상이 발견되었으나, 아바타 자극에 대해서는 비전형성 정도에 따른 효과가 발견되지 않았다. 이는 만화의 등장인물에서 얼굴의 특징이 과장되어 커지거나 작아지는 경향 때문에 아바타에서 허용할 수 있는 비전형성 정도가 크기 때문으로 판단된다. 이와 같은 결과 는 최근 연예인 아바타를 사용한 가상공간의 서비스에서 언캐니밸리 현상을 줄이기 위한 노력이 필요함을 시사한다.

Celebrity endorsement is defined as an agreement between a publicly recognized celebrity and an entity to use the celebrity’s fame to promote a brand or product. Generally, a celebrity is defined as a famous singer, actor, or athlete who frequently appears in public. The celebrity uses his/her public recognition to persuade consumers to purchase a specific product by the endorsement, and the celebrity accepts remunerations from the firm. Celebrity endorsement has been prevalent as an advertising strategy and many advertisers invest enormous amount of money for the celebrity endorsement. Prior research has examined the economic benefits or effectiveness of celebrity endorsement and found that celebrity endorsement attracts attention from consumers and polishes a tarnished brand image, and the celebrity may help advertisements stand out, thus improving their communicative ability. Apart from a general celebrity endorsement advantage, previous studies have found the factors that affect the success or failure of celebrity endorsement. An attractive celebrity can positively influence advertising evaluation, and a celebrity with expertise can increase consumers’ purchase intention through product. In addition, consumers prefer a product endorsed by a highly trustworthy celebrity. Specifically, on the economic worth of celebrity endorsement, most studies have indicated a positive effect. An announcement of a celebrity endorsement contract can bring a positive abnormal benefit to a firm’s stock price. Celebrity endorsement also helps increase the intangible value of a firm, which is the source of competitive edge and sustainable growth. However, despite recent interest in the return on advertising investment, it is not known how and which source factor of the celebrity endorsement can be explained with the firm value. By using text mining and sentiment analysis, the results of this study explain that the sustainable firm value is impacted by various sources of celebrity endorsement. First, the number of words regarding celebrity attractiveness, expertise, and trustworthiness has an impact on the sustainable firm value. Among the three sources, trustworthiness has the biggest impact on the sustainable firm value, which is Tobin’s Q. Second, regarding attractiveness and expertise, increasing proportion of positive words has impact on the firm value. On the other hand, regarding trustworthiness, the number of negative words on occupational issues is important. Third, different celebrity expertise has different impact on the sustainable firm value depending on the degree of job uniqueness and replaceability. Fourth, once the celebrity has lost his/her trustworthiness, the negative impact is hardly recovered as the negative interaction effect between positive impact of celebrity expertise on the sustainable firm value and the loss of trustworthiness is over seven times higher than the positive effects from the expertise. This implies that if an advertiser carefully manages other effects except for the loss of trustworthiness, he/she cannot offset the failure.

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.