Celebrities used in advertising has recently been something that consumers have come in contact with on a daily basis. Corporations use celebrities and their attributes as positive reinforcement and association towards the company or their marketed product. Through increased usage of media, the consumers to this advertising technique have been given an opportunity towards better insight into celebrities’ daily life. People are not only receivers of advertising, they are also media producers for the medias agenda. This makes everyone significant in the distribution of advertising. The area of research is called Celebrity Endorsement. All theories within the area presume that all receivers interpret the message in the same manner. In classic communication research there are theories like habitus, encoding and decoding that are the basis for a receiver perspective. These theories are aimed inter alia at people’s past experience influences how people act in a social structure and the receiver thus detects the communication in different ways. In this study, we have therefore created a deeper understanding of consumer’s perspective in celebrity endorsement for further find links to the theories of classical communication research. In this study we want to create a deeper understanding from the perspective of the receiver of celebrity endorsement. This study is also to find connections to theories within classical communications research. The study will also investigate deeper to understand how people within the same target audience are decoding celebrity and advertising activities. To reach a result we have used a qualitative reception analysis, where focus groups from different target audiences has been used. Within the focus groups discussions of current TV-commercials and fictitious cooperation between celebrities and corporations were used for the participants to express their opinion of celebrities in advertising. The study’s result is summarized in four different perspectives, which emerged from the empirical material. The first perspective has been analyzed from the participants’ earlier experiences. The second perspective deals with the participants’ self-knowledge and differences in their capability to objectively being able to analyze their own, as well as the others capability of decoding the messages. The studies third perspective affects the participants’ confessions. This includes further differences in the participants reasoning and confessing or not confessing to celebrity endorsements impact on them. In the last perspective it is described how participants used irony to make a difficult topic easier to talk about. The result of our study shows that advertising with celebrities are decoded in more ways than are described in the models within celebrity endorsement and that classical communication research should be implemented Keywords: Celebrity endorsement, celebrity, encoding, decoding, habitus, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu, trademarks, brand
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kau-35126 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Widå, Camilla, Miras Wardell, Sara |
| Publisher | Karlstads universitet, Fakulteten för humaniora och samhällsvetenskap (from 2013), Karlstads universitet, Fakulteten för humaniora och samhällsvetenskap (from 2013) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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