You switched on
the TV and a commercial is playing. Maria Sharapova is in the midst of
delivering a top spin to the corner of the opposite court. Clad in clothing
with the distinctive swoosh logo as part of her multi-million dollar
endorsement deal with sports giant NIKE, she smiles as the commercial ends with
the wording - Just do it.
The company is
hoping that the next time you go shopping for tennis clothes; NIKE is where you
go.
Why do companies
rush to sign endorsement contracts with the next big thing in sports and entertainment?
What is it about celebrity endorsement that persuades us to buy a product?
While
researchers have long known that we are more likely to be persuaded by
information coming from highly credible sources than low credibility sources,
the underlying brain mechanisms remains unclear.
Using functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which allows researchers to derive a measurement of neural activity from blood flow in the brain, new research by Dutch
scientists suggest that what makes these advertisements so compelling and
successful is that merely seeing a celebrity expert paired with a product is
sufficient to induce a stronger memory and positive attitude towards the
product.
In the study, 24
female students (mean age 21.8 years) had their brains scanned while being shown
pictures of celebrities and objects in a sequential manner. They were asked to
indicate whether a given celebrity was linked with the subsequent object. For
example, participants were shown a picture of former world number 1 tennis
player Andre Agassi followed by a picture of a sports shoe and asked if there
was a relationship between the two.
The next day
after the brain scan, the participants were asked to rate the celebrities’ expertise
with the object. Their attitudes and memory of the objects were also assessed
and the researchers found that objects that were perceived to be presented by
an expert celebrity were more memorable and also elicited a more favorable
attitude.
Brain imaging
data revealed that participants showed greater left-sided brain activity in
areas associated with semantic processing when the celebrities were paired with
objects that they were perceived to have expertise in than when they were
paired with non-expertise objects.
The researchers
argue that the greater left-sided brain activity meant that participants were engaging
in deeper processing of the appropriately paired celebrities and objects which
resulted in better subsequent memory for the objects.
Greater relative
activity in the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus – brain areas that are
known to be involved in memory also supported their claim that appropriate
celebrity expertise – object pairs were driving the memory effects of these
objects.
This finding thus
suggests that we would remember a golf club better if Tiger Woods was swinging
it in a commercial compared to seeing UK celebrity chef Jamie Oliver putting on
the green.
But does
remembering the objects better translate into actual dollars or are companies
just wasting their money engaging celebrities to market their products? The
study suggests that spending millions on celebrity endorsement is a sound
investment.
Participants indicated
that they were more likely to purchase the product when it had been paired with
an appropriate celebrity expert. Greater celebrity expertise with the product
also increased activity in the caudate nucleus – the brain area involved in
trust and reward processing.
Even though it
is unclear whether male brains would show similar patterns at this juncture, the
researchers touted the study as “the first steps towards a neuroscientific
model of persuasion” and more research is expected to be on the way to improve
our understanding of what makes us buy the things we buy.
So just
remember, the next time you step into a NIKE store looking for that hot tennis
skirt, it is unlikely to be just a happy accident.
