How Does Product-celebrity Congruence and Content Sponsorship Affect Perceived Altruism Among Consumers?

Using social media effectively to promote green advertising is crucial for building a company's sustainability image. It is important to apply appropriate social media promotion in sustainability context to consider different factors that might be overlooked by researchers and practitioners, including the selection of celebrities in the promotion process and the way information is shared. In this paper, we address the question of how companies can achieve better customer perception regarding brand and celebrity promotion of sustainability in social media. Based on a context of plastic waste reduction propaganda, a scenario-based experiment design was employed to analyze data collected from 330 consumers. According to the results of experiments, marketers have been suggested to ensure the level of congruence between celebrity and product is high, and social media messages should be organic to achieve greater customer perceived altruism toward brands and celebrities. An analysis of structural equation models also indicates that the perceived altruism of celebrity mediates the relationship between perceived altruism of brand and intention to share information from social media. By examining the relationships between customer perceptions toward various actors of social media communication, this study contributes to the literature of marketing advertisement in the sustainability context.