Celebrity Endorsement and Customer Loyalty in the
Telecommunications Industry in Port Harcourt
Bright ZorBari-Nwitambu1,Sylva Ezema Kalu2
Citation :Bright ZorBari-Nwitambu,Sylva Ezema Kalu, Celebrity Endorsement and Customer Loyalty in the Telecommunications Industry in Port Harcourt International Journal of Managerial Studies and Research 2017,5(9) : 57-71
This paper focused on examining the relationship between celebrity endorsement and customer loyalty in the telecommunications industry in Port Harcourt. To achieve this, we sought to know the opinion of 50 top managers/ contact staff of the 5 major telecommunications giants in Port Harcourt namely; MTN Nigeria, Glo, Airtel, 9mobile (formerly Etisalat) and Starcomms on how a favourite celebrity can influence consumers' choice of patronage of their brands using 50 copies of structured questionnaire. Correlation analysis with Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (rho) and regression analysis were carried out with the aid of the SPSS 20.0 software, to ascertain the association between studied variables and the extent of their relationship respectively. Also, a reliability test with chronbach alpha of 0.7 benchmark was conducted and the result of the study was 0.9 indicating a high reliability of the research instrument. Drawing on the theory of marketing communication, we concluded that while all predictors have a positive relationship with the criterion variable, celebrity trustworthiness and credibility were discovered to have significant influence on customer loyalty in the telecommunications industry in Port Harcourt. Based on the conclusion, we recommend that Telecommunications companies should hire the services of only those celebrity endorsers that are trustworthy and credible enough to represent the company in good light.