Celebrity Endorsement as an Effective Tool for Destination Marketing among Occupation Groups in Bangalore

Abstract

Celebrity  Endorsement  is  one  of  the  major  forms  of advertising in which a business organization 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  day, 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  consider the  tourism advertisements  that  are  endorsed  by  celebrities and  to determine whether the use of celebrities have a greater effect than the use of non-celebrities when advertising a tourist  destination. Data  was  collected  from  250 respondents  from  Bangalore  through  a  questionnaire. Some of the tools that are been used to test the hypothesis are one sample t- test, ANOVA and Tukey test. The  major  findings  from  the  study  were  that  the respondents only get brand recognition and recall of the destination when the advertisement is done by a celebrity endorser; it was found that non-celebrity advertisements are more convincing and better choice makers. It was also 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.