Briana Anderson - Cornell University

marketing, a person’s attractiveness will lead to greater perceptions of credibility
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when the product being marketed is related to beauty.
With regard to personal involvement, the findings of this study did support not
H3, that is, the findings did not indicate that high involvement levels lead people to
rely on attractiveness less. In fact, those people with high involvement gave overall
higher endorser credibility scores (perhaps due to their personal connection with breast
cancer) and tended to view attractiveness as taking away from expertise and
trustworthiness. In essence, those with high involvement made greater judgments
rather than less, which contradicts theories of involvement such as ELM, which would
predict that those with greater involvement would rely less on heuristics such as
attractiveness to make a judgment. As stated in the limitation section, my
conceptualization and measurement of involvement differed from ELM advertising
study conceptualizations and that may account for the difference.
The point of a corporate social responsibility message is to create a trusting
relationship of an organization with its publics and to convince the public that the
organization is interested in contributing to the well being of society. This is a very
different goal than simply selling a product. In this case, merely a pretty face may not
lead to attributions of trustworthiness and expertise found in marketing and advertising
research.
For industry, this study has several important findings and raises a number of
considerations for public relations and/or marketing decision-makers when launching
a corporate social responsibility or social marketing campaign. First, when choosing
an endorser, the decision-maker should consider whether or not an external vs. internal
endorser would be more credible. This could vary depending on who the audience of
the campaign is – consumers, stockholders, employees, etc. Another important factor
is whether or not the person (if a known individual) has an already-established positive