Celebrity endorsement and repeat purchase intention amongst Pepsi beverage consumers

The goal of this thesis is to determine the effect of celebrity endorsement on repeat purchase intention among Pepsi cola consumers at Istanbul Gelişim University. The targeted audience were students at the University where a sample of 388 students were used. The use of a structured questionnaire was deployed to obtain primary data. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used. The response rate of this study was 91% based on 352 respondents out of 388. The attributes of the celebrity endorsers were discussed in this study with the aim of determining the impact of celebrity endorsers on customers' repeat purchase intention. The characteristics were perceived expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness of celebrities. The analysis of celebrity endorsement in the consumption of Pepsi Cola, showed that the 36.7% of the customers' repeat purchase intention can be predicted by the celebrities' perceived expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness. Regression analysis provided the relationship of celebrity endorsement and repeat purchase intention, showing that, there exist a positive moderately-strong relationship between trustworthiness of celebrities and customers' repeat purchase intention, whereas attractiveness of celebrities showed a positive weak relationship with repeat purchase intention. Perceived expertise however showed a negatively weak relationship with repeat purchase intention. These three characteristics of celebrity-endorses have a relationship with repeat purchase intention of customers. However, in terms of the level of significance of relationships of the research variables, regression analysis confirmed that while trustworthiness and attractiveness of celebrities have a significant relationship with consumers' repeat purchase intention, perceived expertise of celebrities do not have a significant relationship with customers' repeat purchase intention. As a complement to the findings by other researchers, there are numerous contributions from this thesis for both theory and advertising campaigns. The output from this thesis contributes to the source credibility body of work, as it empirically underlines the relevance of trustworthiness above other source characteristics when considering consumer involvement.