AUTHOR
Sandin, David; Widmark, Patrik

DEPARTMENT
Business Administration and Social Sciences / Industrial marketing and e-commerce

SUMMARY
Many of today's companies use celebrities in marketing campaigns in order to on a more effective way, reach out with the message to the target group. Those celebrities that are used as endorsers of the product/the service are mostly movie stars or athletes. This type of marketing has become very popular but also involves certain risks. This leads to our aim with this thesis where through research we aim to gaining a deeper understanding of the reasons for using celebrities as promotion tools in marketing and how the risks that arise can be described and prevented.

The thesis has been limited to a case study of a specific Swedish company within the dairy sector, Skånemejerier, that use celebrities in their marketing. Telephone interviews with manager responsible for sponsoring at Skånemejerier was the source of empirical data for this thesis. Collected data are analyzed and conclusions are drawn as following:

Skånemejerier uses celebrities in their marketing in order to take benefits from the athlete’s positive properties and to provide these along with the product's properties. The choice of celebrities is based more on the celebrities' trustworthiness rather than attractiveness. The biggest risk with the use of celebrities in marketing are the risk of using illegal substances. In order to avoid this risk and other risks, Skånemejerier is very selective in its choice of celebrities to collaborate with. Another important factor is that Skånemejerier only collaborates with celebrities that already use products from the company before any cooperation is initiated.

ISSN 1404-5508 / ISRN LTU-SHU-EX--05/113--SE / NR 2005:113