Briana Anderson - Cornell University

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study. These hypotheses predicted that attractiveness would be positively correlated
with perceptions of overall credibility, including the measures of endorser
trustworthiness and expertise. These results could have been a function of the clothing
styles or perceived age of the endorsers, as mentioned in the limitations section, but
this thesis posits that attractiveness of endorser has different effects depending on the
type of message. This calls into question whether the Ohanian (1990) scale is
appropriate to use in every endorser study.
Ohanian’s (1990) endorser credibility scale includes attractiveness as one of
the underlying constructs of the scale. Ohanian (1990) justifies including
attractiveness as a construct based on Joseph’s (1982) review of attractiveness in
advertising and related disciplines that suggests that attractive communicators are
consistently liked more and have a positive impact on products. Using attractiveness
as a construct for endorser credibility in this study was inappropriate for two reasons:
1) because attractiveness was manipulated as part of the independent conditions and 2)
this is a study focused on the selling of an idea (social responsibility of a company)
not a consumer product.
The results of this study indicate that in a public relations/ social responsibility
campaign (versus product advertising and marketing), the physical attractiveness of
endorser behaves differently. In fact, the data supported an opposite finding of what
would typically be expected of attractiveness, that is, that it leads to lower levels of
perceived expertise and trustworthiness rather than hiher. One possible explanation is
that perceptions of an endorser in public relations (or the selling of ideas) may be
based on different standards than those in marketing and advertising. Specifically,
constructs such as trustworthiness and expertise may be more relevant to PR than
marketing a consumer product. Studies such as that of Maddux and Rogers (1980), in
which selling a product was not the goal of the persuasive message, indicate that