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This work identifies the differences in the relevance of online endorsers' physical attractiveness and expertise depending on whether an endorsed product is related to attractiveness. It provides a new perspective regarding the source-credibility model and explores unprecedented relationships. To date, many studies investigating online endorsers have focused on attractiveness-related products, but online endorsers are also employed for attractiveness-unrelated products. Practitioners therefore need to know which requirements are relevant to attractiveness-unrelated products. However, no existing study has compared online endorsers of attractiveness-related or attractiveness-unrelated products. Our investigation is based on an empirical experiment including 576 participants, analyzed with structural equation modeling. The subsamples are compared by multigroup analysis, resulting in counterintuitive results. Both online endorsers and practitioners can greatly benefit from our findings. Our findings indicate that attractiveness is a relevant requirement for both types of products, although attractiveness has a stronger impact on brand-related variables of attractiveness-related products. Male attractiveness is also more relevant than female attractiveness regarding attractiveness-related products. Concerning expertise, we find no differences between the two types of products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the researchers investigate the issue of social influencers as endorsers of healthy nutrition. This issue is highly underexplored and involves two aspects that might pose a special challenge: (1) overshadowing and (2) consumers' lack of involvement in healthy nutrition. Based on an experiment that included 289 valid observations, the researchers tested two influencer archetypes, namely, an attractive influencer and a sporty influencer. The data were analyzed with structural equation modeling in SmartPLS. For the attractive influencer, the researchers found a small overshadowing effect. The sporty influencer did not elicit any overshadowing. Furthermore, the sporty influencer appeared to have more favorable effects on highly involved consumers. The opposite was true for low-involved consumers: the attractive influencer had a stronger impact. Based on these surprising results, the researchers propose implications for theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of brands rely on ecolabelling as associative branding strategy for communicating their sustainability performance. Specifically, associative branding aims to link a brand to an ecolabel to embed sustainability into brand knowledge to provide an added value for consumers. In this regard, the present study applies a combined measurement approach that examines both implicit and explicit information processing to assess consumers’ brand associations related to sustainability. Specifically, a pre/post-testing is conducted to evaluate the framing effect of ecolabel exposure in a brand advertisement on the enhancement of brand knowledge. The results of the current study provide evidence that in particular implicit brand sustainability is a favorable brand association that positively affects consumers’ decision-making and preferences. Furthermore, the results reveal a relevant framing effect of ecolabelling on the enhancement of brand knowledge, on both implicit and explicit levels. In addition, the study results indicate the existence of three efficacy parameters that influence brand knowledge transfer: adequate ecolabel-brand fit, early ecolabel recognition time, and distinct implicit-explicit knowledge acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]