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The importance of key celebrity characteristics for customer segmentation by age and gender: Does beauty matter in professional football?

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Abstract

This paper examines through the lens of sport whether male and female customers as well as differently aged customers focus on different celebrity characteristics and whether they are influenced by celebrities’ facial attractiveness. Drawing on psychological and sociological theories like attachment theory, social role theory of gender, or social norm theory as well as on the academic literature on celebrity endorsement in general, we develop several hypotheses regarding how a fan’s age and gender affect the importance of key characteristics of football stars—namely experience, personality, exemplary behavior, and skills. Using a proprietary dataset that combines archival data concerning professional football players and clubs with survey data of more than 2100 football fans, we find evidence that female fans attach more importance to a player’s personality and behavior while male fans seem to focus on experience and skills. We further find that when fans get older, the importance of a player’s behavior and experience increases. Moreover, our results show that the facial attractiveness of players clearly influences fan perceptions. Our results contribute to existing research on customer segmentation by providing a more differentiated picture of the effects of key celebrity characteristics on different customers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FC Bayern München AG, Internationalization and Strategy, Säbener Straße 51-57, 81547, Munich, Germany

    Daniel Hoegele

  2. Center for Sports and Management, WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, Erkrather Straße 224a, 40233, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Sascha L. Schmidt

  3. School of Economics and Finance, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane, QLD, 4001, Australia

    Benno Torgler

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  1. Daniel Hoegele
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  2. Sascha L. Schmidt
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  3. Benno Torgler
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Correspondence to Daniel Hoegele.

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Table 5 Lindell–Whitney-test for assessing common method bias
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Hoegele, D., Schmidt, S.L. & Torgler, B. The importance of key celebrity characteristics for customer segmentation by age and gender: Does beauty matter in professional football?. Rev Manag Sci 10, 601–627 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-015-0172-x

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