these celebrities add value to a company, brand or product. Celebrities add value through the process of meaning transfer. The meaning transfer model suggests that celebrities develop a persona through the types of roles they play in society as well as how they are portrayed in the media. Collectively, the culturally constituted society then assigns meaning to celebrities (Amos, 2008). When celebrities endorse a product, the meaning developed around a particular celebrity will - or at least it is hoped for by advertisers - transfer to a company, brand, or product. Thus, when a consumer identifies with a celebrity (identification occurs when a person is willing to accept influence from another person) (Kelman, 2006), he/she purchases the product in the hope of claiming some of these transferred meanings for their own lives.
1.2 Research Problem
International brands nowadays need advertising promotion because it helps to improve sales, and the content of advertisements mostly focused on endorser. However the culture of advertisement is differing, an endorsed advertisement should not only consider the types and nationality of endorser, but also the celebrity endorser/product fit.
The success of an advertisement depends on the selection of an endorser. The endorser must be correctly chosen in order to deliver the right message to the public. For example Anlene in India, whose target audience is adults over 35 (and chiefly women) is being endorsed by dancer Mallika Sarabhai in another ad that uses Bharatanatyam to focus attention on the product. It is impossible to use the young celebrity to endorse the product because the target market is above 35 years old. Choosing the right endorser will increase customers confident towards the products, and at the same time, the sales will be increased as well.
Finding a right endorser is quite a difficult task; they may or may not bring benefit to the company. First, celebrity source credibility is one of the factors; it had been divided into many types of credibility such as attractiveness, trustworthiness, expertise and so on. Some argument has arisen that it is useless if company based of these celebrity source credibility but some support it. In this kind of situation, which type of endorser appeared to be better? So far there is no certain answer for this question.
Second problem that will influence the effectiveness of celebrity endorsement advertisement is endorser's nationality. In fact, some international companies believe that it is more suitable to hire well-known international celebrities such as artists and model as endorsers for advertising purpose, for instance: LV and DKNY. However, some brands think that different country or place has different culture; therefore different endorser should be used. For example Nike will choose their local sport stars such as Michael Jordan as endorsers in America but in Asia countries, they will use Asian sport stars like Nakata Hidetoshi.
Next is celebrity endorser/product fit. For reference, NBA star Yao Ming first appeared on a China telecommunication company, China Unicom's CDMA mobile phone advertisements as endorser, some doubted
