Determining Impact of Brand-Celebrity Congruence on Print-Ad Effectiveness using Eye Tracking Technology

Abstract

 A brand ambassador is commonly used by various organizations while creating a brand image in the mind of the consumer, hence it becomes imperative to understand the implications of a celebrity endorser. This paper attempts to determine the impact of brand ambassador on the brand recall with a high as well as low product-celebrity congruence. The response of the consumers was recorded via an eye tracker, which essentially captured the physical aspects of the attention of the consumer when he looks at a digital print ad. The parameters used for this study are – Time to first fixation, Heat maps and gaze plots which helped us analyse which section of the ad, the viewer saw first and at which section did he spend the most time at. After conducting the eye-tracking experiment, the respondents were asked a few questions to understand the recall of the ads shown. This focused group response was combined with the eye-tracking results to determine the brand recall. The recall values of both the groups (one with high product-celebrity congruence and the other with low product-celebrity congruence) were run through statistical analysis (ANOVA) for determining if there exists a major difference in the recall between the two groups. It was found that the recall was more for advertisements where the product-celebrity congruence was higher.