Celebrity, Convergence and Transformation

Douglas Brownlie, Paul Hewer, Finola Kerrigan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351742696
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Bringing together the latest thinking on both celebrity brands and celebrity culture from academics specialising in the field of marketing, this book explores a range of insightful contexts in order to add vigour and vitality to our understanding of the connections between celebrities, markets and culture. It unpacks the identity theoretics which have their origins in the turn to celebrity culture and the spectacle and glamour of mass-media practices. In doing so, the contributors hint at new forms of individuation where the line between the virtual and the actual is blurred, and where images of celebrities construct and deconstruct themselves. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management.

Marketing and the cultural production of celebrity in the era of media convergence

Chris Hackley, School of Management, Royal Holloway University of London, UK

Rungpaka Amy Hackley, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, UK

Abstract Celebrity endorsement research in the marketing literature has been over-reliant on an exogenous notion of celebrity as something produced outside of the marketing system, from which meanings can be transferred to brands within the marketing system. In fact, marketing has been deeply implicated in the constitution of celebrity since the dawn of Western consumer culture in the early part of the twentieth century. In the era of media convergence, there is a pressing need for researchers in marketing to re-evaluate the meta-assumptions around celebrity and its relation to marketing in the light of marketing’s culturally constitutive role.

Introduction

Celebrity, marketing, and consumer culture

Astute marketers have recognised the commercial value of the celebrated individual since the emergence of print media. Showbusiness led the way in the profitable art of crafting public personas, and impresarios from P.T. Barnum to Simon Cowell leveraged the public’s passion for prominent performers to make serious money from frivolous entertainment. Indeed, the extraordinary success of the Hollywood movie industry since the 1920s was built on a system that produced stars to order in response to the demands not of screenplay writers or directors, but of fans (Barbas, 2001), so it would be an oversimplification to suggest that media personnel control the process without hindrance. Since the 1950s, the celebration of being known simply for being known (Boorstin, 1992) has migrated from entertainment into many less likely spheres, including politics, sport, literature, music, business, journalism, art, academia, and even cookery (Brownlie & Hewer, 2011). The proliferation of the celebrated in contemporary consumer culture might be explained by an unaccountable increase in personages of excellence, but is far more likely to be driven, at least in part, by motives not unconnected to marketing and commercial interest.

As we will see in examples later in this article, celebrity is commercially indispensable for lending brands an emotional resonance and extending the potential market into new segments. Such is the centrality of celebrity for attracting audiences to media brands and, concomitantly, for indirectly enabling every kind of mediated promotion, some cultural theorists have suggested that the facilitation of commerce is the principal function of the famous (Turner, 2004). Certainly, as popular journalism becomes the only economically viable form of news (Wolf, 2003), the famous name or face is a powerful aid in building online traffic and generating advertising revenue for media brands. What is more, celebrities can be seen as fundamental to Western consumer culture and central to the re-invention of global capitalism (Kerrigan, Brownlie, Hewer, & Daza-LeTouze, 2011; Lasch & Lury, 2007). Celebrity is a branch of branding in itself (Schroeder, 2005) but it is not just about making money: since the 1960s, celebrity has even taken over the political arena as ‘personalities’ take precedence over policies. Errant showbusiness celebrities are often criticised as bad role models when they are imitated by the less privileged. Celebrity, in fact, carries a social and economic influence out of all proportion to the trivial achievements of some who find themselves included in this peculiar pantheon. The very insubstantiality of celebrity hints at the marketing imperative lying behind it. There are, clearly, vested interests involved as brands compete for the kind of attention that celebrities can deliver at a stroke, or at least at a social media click.

As we note above, celebrity and marketing have never been far apart, and many of today’s aspects of celebrity are not entirely new. From Alexander The Great to David Beckham, there has been a suspicion that some noted figures were also talented self-publicists, and the discomfort readers might feel in having those two names juxtaposed in the same sentence reflects the persistent tensions that circulate around the legitimacy of celebrity, fame, renown; however, it is conceived. Cultural theorists differ on the extent to which contemporary celebrity is driven from the bottom up by consumers (e.g. Cashmore, 2006) or imposed by dominant institutions within the media world (Hesmondhalgh, 2005). They also differ on whether the social consequences of the media obsession with celebrity are partially positive, or wholly negative (Rojek, 2012). There is broad agreement, though, that celebrity in contemporary culture is qualitatively and quantitatively different from that of previous eras. As all media channels converge around the internet and old media are integrated with social media (Jenkins, 2008) to mobilise an entertainment-driven economy (Wolf, 2003), the business of celebrity has assumed a cultural intensity, cyclical rapidity, and economic imperative never seen before. Most significantly, celebrity in the industrially developed West has become democratised (Driessens, 2013) to an extent previously unknown in two senses. First, the means to become well-known are now available to millions through, for example, reality TV shows, social media, video editing and sharing, weblogs, and 24-hour news and entertainment via mobile devices. Second, through the participative consumer mechanisms of social media (Jenkins, 2008), consumers are able to elect celebrities more quickly and efficiently than ever before. The ostensible democratisation, and perhaps the proletarianisation, of celebrity, though, has not resulted in a lessening of its cultural or economic importance: far from it.

In this article, then, we attempt to contribute a perspective that is new in three respects. First, we re-frame celebrity endorsement as a culturally constituted effect of marketing rather than an association between marketing and non-marketing culture. Second, we bring a cultural perspective that highlights the media performance of celebrity, thus updating the conceptualisation of celebrity for the convergent media era. Third, we bring a marketing perspective, broadly conceived, as a unifying element of the production of celebrity that is lacking in both the disparate cultural studies treatments of celebrity and in the marketing literature on celebrity endorsement.

Below, we briefly review a small but representative selection of celebrity endorsement literature to highlight what we term a key ‘meta-assumption’ of the field, namely that celebrity is exogenous to the marketing system, and its symbolic values are imported through endorsement and other contractual brand relationships. We do not maintain that all celebrity endorsement research in marketing ignores the cultural dimension; rather, we observe that the ontological implications of the cultural constitution of celebrity are often neglected, resulting in an under-theorised relation between the celebrity and the brand. We then discuss the emergence of the celebrity in consumer culture from the early twentieth century to the present day convergence era to further highlight the neglected role of marketing in the cultural production of celebrity. Finally, we conclude by discussing some implications of a more fully culturally contextualised theorisation of celebrity for marketing research and practice.

The meta-assumptions of celebrity endorsement research

The circulation of celebrity in the convergence era, then, is thoroughly commodified and fully integrated with the machinery of marketing, yet the role of marketing in the production of celebrity remains under-explored in the celebrity endorsement literature. Our purpose here is not to engage with the detail of particular celebrity endorsement research studies, but to address a governing ontological meta-assumption that hovers over the field. This is the assumption that celebrity is exogenous to the marketing system and that benefits flow in a linear fashion from the celebrity into the marketing system to benefit the brand, and from there, to the consumer.

McCracken’s (1989) meaning-transfer meta-model of celebrity (see also McCracken, 1986) has not been unchallenged, and yet its broad thesis retains an implicit presence in celebrity endorsement research studies that seek to measure the influence of celebrities on consumer attitudes to the brand. The model was designed to improve upon the source credibility and source attractiveness models by acknowledging the symbolic and socio-cultural character of the notion of celebrity. However, we suggest that the way it is typically interpreted in research studies tends to reify the idea of celebrity to overplay the linearity of meaning-transfer from celebrity to brand and to ignore the role of the marketing system itself in the production of celebrity.

Under the meaning-transfer model, the economic force of the endorsement is assumed to rest on the consumer’s perception of the credibility of the endorser and their ‘fit’ or degree of ‘match’ with the brand values (Erdogan, 1999; Kamins & Gupta, 1994). The conventional logic of celebrity endorsement holds that the celebrity must be ‘aligned’ with the sponsor or product to be endorsed, so that there is a perceived coherence between the two. Without this alignment, the endorsement is said to appear incongruent to consumers and negative attitudes may result (Aaker, 2004). In this way, celebrity endorsement is seen to ‘…back up other elements in the marketing mix such as product design, branding, packaging, pricing, and place decisions (distribution channels and physical distribution) in order to attempt to create positive effects in the minds of consumers’ (Erdogan, 1999, p. 291).

The key assumption is that the celebrity acquires positive associations through success in an exogenous field of endeavour before becoming linked through advertising and public relations (PR) to the brand, creating a current along which congruent forms of likeability flow from the celebrity to the brand and on to the consumer who enlists the associated meanings into their own identity projects (Tom et al., 1992). This transfer is often, though not always, conceived as uni-directional and in either direction is subject to the perceived match-up of values and attributes between celebrity and brand (Buil, de Chernatony, & Hem, 2009).

Over three decades, this meta-assumption has given rise to a plethora of research studies that implicitly set celebrity outside the realm of marketing to conceptualise and measure the effect of endorsements on consumer perceptions of credibility or brand fit (a small selection of representative examples include Hung, 2014; Jin & Phua, 2014; Pradhan, Duraipandian, & Sethi, 2014; Silvera & Austad, 2004; Spry, Pappu, & Cornwell, 2011). The celebrity is assumed to be logically and ontologically prior to the effect, and the phenomenon of reverse benefits flowing from the brand to the celebrity is rarely considered (one exception being Halonen-Knight & Hurmerinta, 2010). A fuller understanding of the reciprocity of effects in the constitution of the celebrity/brand requires a stronger articulation of the fluid and boundary-spanning nature of contemporary celebrity in marketing research.

The constitution of celebrity in twentieth century consumer culture

Conceptualising celebrity

For the purpose of this article, we use the terms celebrity, fame, and renown almost inter-changeably to refer to individuals who, for whatever reason, attain widespread public recognition amongst consumers, who include, but are by no means limited to, fans (Wohlfeil & Whelan, 2012). We suggest that the distinction between earned fame and undeserved celebrity (Boorstin, 1992) may be of continued debate but is not necessarily useful in an analysis of how celebrity plays out as a market-driven media performance. Neither is it necessarily useful to mark a distinction between the old famous and the new famous. It is tempting, but problematic, to assert that celebrity today has less cultural integrity then it did in earlier times. High-achieving athletes, academics, politicians, and others with substantive claims to fame could argue that they are not merely known for being known (Boorstin, 1992), but for their achievement and skill, unlike many early twentieth century movie stars who had a supposedly unique and charismatic ‘personality’ crafted for them by the studios (Gamson, 1994). In the convergent era, though, the performative aspects of celebrity become the key elements in driving consumption, rendering celebrity a tautology for marketing purposes.

The tension in the notion of celebrity between those who are deserving of renown, who serendipitously acquire fame, and those who are their own best publicist can be seen in many famous figures from Julius Caesar to William Shakespeare and beyond to Buffalo Bill, George Washington, Salvadore Dali, David Hockney, and David Beckham. Boorstin (1992) distinguishes between earned fame and ascribed celebrity, while Rojek (2012) refers to achieved, ascribed, and celetoid celebrity. Clearly, for celebrity to be achieved, it must also be ascribed, since achievement in any sphere requires the acknowledgement of peers before it can migrate outwards, so it is not necessarily easy to disentangle achievement from ascription. Celetoid celebrity refers to the ephemeral fame achieved by reality TV stars and the subjects of tabloid sensation. Celetoids may often be astute and intuitive PR operators who are complicit in their own manipulation, but it can hardly be doubted that they are outputs of the media system, as well as inputs.

The tension between achieved, ascribed, and celetoid celebrity plays around a fourth category, the aristocratic theory (Gamson, 1994) that holds that personal greatness is innate, perhaps by virtue of a family name, or, in a later variation promoted by the Hollywood movie industry, by virtue of unique charisma, ‘personality’, or glamour that sets an individual apart from the ordinary simply for who they are: a ‘star’. All four elements, achieved, ascribed, celetoid, and aristocratic celebrity, can be seen to be in inter-play around some celebrities as their prestige migrates from their original field of expertise, if they had one, to many other audiences, lending them a fluid quality that opens up their personal brand to many possible iterations and interpretations, David Beckham (Cashmore & Parker, 2003) being a prime example, discussed below.

The disintermediation and democratisation of the production of celebrity

The technological advances that made possible the circulation of visual images in print media mid-way through the nineteenth century meant that prominent individuals could now be recognised and, in effect, used to enhance the appeal of news stories to sell print publications. Later, moving pictures were an even more powerful medium through which to connect the public with events and personalities far beyond their immediate experience. Half a century after Barnum excited press and public with his special brand of mendacious ballyhoo (Brown & Hackley, 2012), Hollywood adopted a somewhat different style of dark PR. Once the studios, and the artists, had realised that named actors drove sales of theatre tickets, and of anything else the stars used or promoted (Barbas, 2001), a network of publicity agents crafted actors’ public images to fit the movie roles and genres they promoted. As fans grew less credulous toward the PR strategies of the movie industry, the relationship between consumers and media production became more complex. Fans pitched ideas and actively elected stars by voting with their theatre tickets. The movie business learned to listen carefully to its most influential consumers. In effect, the Hollywood celebrity production process had become disintermediated: the fans had prised control from the PR agents, movie journalists, and studio publicists more than 70 years before the appearance of social media. Of course, the machinery of publicity remained opaque to all but the movie cognoscenti, but these Über fans numbered in their millions. They were tenacious in digging out the details of the stars’ real lives, as opposed to the ‘reel’ lives constructed for them by the studios (Barbas, 2001).

The aristocratic model of celebrity as something innate in the charm or personality of the star (Gamson, 199...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Celebrity, convergence and transformation
• 1 Marketing and the cultural production of celebrity in the era of media convergence
• 2 Puppets of necessity? Celebritisation in structured reality television
• 3 Producing and consuming celebrity identity myths: unpacking the classed identities of Cheryl Cole and Katie Price
• 4 The spectacularization of suffering: an analysis of the use of celebrities in ‘Comic Relief’ UK’s charity fundraising campaigns
• 5 ‘And Ziggy played guitar’: Bowie, the market, and the emancipation and resurrection of Ziggy Stardust
• 6 Nigellissima: a study of glamour, performativity and embodiment
• 7 Fabricating celebrity brands via scandalous narrative: crafting, capering and commodifying the comedian, Russell Brand
• 8 The authentic celebrity brand: unpacking Ai Weiwei’s celebritised selves
• 9 The production and consumption activities relating to the celebrity artist
• 10 Unpacking celebrity brands through unpaid market communications
• 11 Celebrities as human brands: an investigation of the effects of personality and time on celebrities’ appeal
• Index