Message source and credibility
The decision about which, if any, of these personas to employ largely depends on their credibility – is this a credible source to convey the brand message? The basis on which credibility can be established will vary depending on the brand, the purpose of the message, and the target audience. Credibility can be broken down into a set of sub-criteria, sometimes referred to as the TEARS model (Shimp, 2010), as shown in Table 1.
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Trustworthiness | Being perceived as honest, believable, dependable – as someone who can be trusted even if they are not necessarily an expert |
| Expertise | Having specific skills, knowledge, or abilities with respect to the endorsed brand |
| Attractiveness | Positively adhering to a group’s concept of attractiveness, physical or otherwise |
| Respect | Being admired owing to one’s personal qualities and accomplishments |
| Similarity | The extent to which a source matches an audience in terms of characteristics relevant to the endorsement |
In the following activity, you will have the opportunity to test out the TEARS model in the context of a marketing communications campaign.
Activity 3 Source credibility
Task 1
Identify a marketing communications campaign that features one of the personas you read above. If you cannot think of one, a quick web search will provide lots of examples.
Task 2
Once you have identified your endorser, make a note of how they meet each of the TEARS attributes. Which do you think they meet, and why?
| Attribute | Does the endorser meet the TEARS attribute? |
|---|---|
| Trustworthiness | |
| Expertise | |
| Attractiveness | |
| Respect | |
| Similarity |
Feedback
How did you find that activity? What you probably found was that assessing the persona against the TEARS criteria involved making a number of judgements about them. How did you make these judgements? Did you try to find some evidence that linked the persona to the campaign? Or did you draw on your personal opinion?
In a short activity like this, you probably did the latter. However, in practice, marketers often spend huge amounts of time and money researching the ‘right’ endorser for their campaign. In order to do this, they will often start with the IMC strategy framework and consider the credibility of the persona in relation to the other aspects of the strategy: the objectives of the campaign, the media strategy and the positioning of the brand and, very importantly, the target audience. On other occasions, the whole campaign might be built around the endorser; this is common when a high-profile celebrity endorser is employed.
Despite the best efforts of marketers, any choice of endorser entails a degree of risk. This is never more the case than when employing celebrity endorsers, as you will explore in the next section.