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Comment by mozumder | Hacker News Reader

When a celebrity buys something, it is perceived as higher quality, since a low quality product would damage that celebrity's brand. Celebrities also have filters for bad branding, too.

This isn't new a new field of research. This is literally and exactly how branding works.

If you feel a century of advertising science is unproven, feel free to show your own research that goes against the experiences of millions of people in the field.

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Would be interesting to see those studies. But at the same time, consumers are much more sophisticated these days and so those studies would need to be repeated with a modern audience. For example, no one believes LeBron James wears Nike because they're the best, they know he's being paid $1 billion to wear them.

That's just factually incorrect. Celebrity endorsements are actually more powerful now than in the past, I'm assuming because youtube style celebrity makes it seem more like the persona the celebrity presents is an actual person, or just more exposure though those explanations are just my handwave. https://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/nielsenglobal/apac/docs/...

Someone's random article from a non-ranked journal, but looks like it's got some decent reference papers http://www.jimsjournal.org/13%20Yi%20Ching%20Tsai.pdf

I agree that celebrity endorsements are effective. The question is why are they effective. I disagreed that celebrity endorsements influence perceived quality. This is different than perceived value which includes many factors, one of which is perceived quality.

A google search provides very little studies that address endorser on perceived quality of the product. The couple I found provided mixed results, with questionable applicability to western audiences (E.g. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2814907).

Those who are asserting that its obviously true that endorser influences perceived quality apparently do not have the literature behind them.

I think you're (unintentionally) equivocating on value vs quality. The grandparent comment used "quality" in the colloquial sense for value as best I read it. I doubt that anyone running a company thinks that having thier name next to gory images makes people think the skill of the shoe stitching (quality in your meaning?) is worse, but that it reduces the alignment of the pnumbra between the company and the individual reducing the value of company's brand / ability to sell products to the consumer.

That's a plausible reading of the disagreement

> consumers are much more sophisticated these days

Do you have something to back that up? Curious if this is true, or just your perception.

For example, no one believes LeBron James wears Nike because they're the best, they know he's being paid $1 billion to wear them.

Consider the possibility that all basketball shoes are substantially identical, and that Nike is paying LeBron $1B simply to differentiate theirs.

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