Celebrity Endorsement Solving the Destination Marketing Puzzle

Abstract

Celebrity endorsement advertising has become an essential element of the advertising strategy. Celebrity endorsement is one of the ways out for marketing problems. An advertisement that uses celebrity endorsers enjoys high recognition among the consumers. It helps the consumer to recognise and recall the brand thus influencing the buying behavior. Since celebrity endorsers create an elevated effect on purchase decision of consumers, producers and retailers always prefer to use celebrities in their advertisement. Further, it will add on to the impact rate if the celebrity endorser is endorsingthe product or service for an extended or longer period. Travel and tourism is one of the largest service sectors in India. The main aim of this industry is to develop and promote tourism, maintain and increase the competitiveness of India as a tourist destination, improve and expand existing tourism products to ensure employment generation and thus bringing about economic growth to India. The paper also investigates the various motivating factors of the endorsers taken into consideration to visit the advertised destination. For this,the most important factors of celebrity endorsement were taken note of through extensive literature reviews. Making an inspection on the Swatch Bharat scheme and the involvement of celebrities gives more relevance to the study. The data used was partially primary and partially secondary so that all the aspects could be identified and covered. The data was analysed with the help of statistical package for the social science SPSS with tests such as One sample t-test, ANOVA, Chi Square test, Friedman test.