Brain science: Here's why you can't resist celebrity endorsem*nts (2024)

I have a problem. Every time I see a celebrity, my first thought is that I know them personally. I have notoriously embarrassed friends, colleagues, and family by walking up, talking up, and even hugging Tom Brady, Denise Richards, Gary Busey, Matthew McConaughey (I call him Matt), and many others as they awkwardly try to run from me.

Just last week I saw my “good friend” Cuba Gooding Jr. at a restaurant, as he graciously played along and almost stole a slice of my pizza.

It turns out that I am not alone. Our brains were not built for the new-age notion of celebrity. We evolved without TV, movies, gossip magazines, and other mental junk food. Our brains are highly tuned to recognize people, mainly because it was once a life or death decision to determine friend from foe.

When we met in the wild, it was critical to remember friendly faces and deadly to forget our enemies. But that same mechanism for remembering faces is ill-equipped to distinguish between our make-believe friends on TV and our real ones. So it’s not uncommon to think of celebrities as part of the family.

Advertisers have been exploiting our celebrity neurons for years. The concept of using celebrity endorsem*nts to market products is almost as old as marketing itself. In the 1930s, baseball legend Babe Ruth was one of the first people paid to endorse a brand, Red Rock Cola. The trend has been going strong ever since, with athletes, musicians, and actors raking in millions to promote consumer goods. It’s big business, with individual contracts reaching into the stratosphere: LeBron James has a lifetime Nike contract worth an estimated $500 million; Kevin Durant signed a 10-year, $300 million Nike contract. 50 Cent endorsed Vitamin Water for a share of the company, earning $100 million when it sold; Beyonce signed a $50 million contract with Pepsi.

A celebrity endorsem*nt increases a company’s sales an average of 4% relative to its competition, and also increases a company’s stock value by 0.25%, according to research byHarvard Business School professor Anita Elberseand Barclays Capital analyst Jeroen Verleun. For large companies—which are more likely to use celebrity endorsem*nts—4% can be billions, justifying the exorbitant costs.

Why do celebrity endorsem*nts work? The answer lies in the brain. First, our minds do not do a good job of differentiating between real and make-believe, so celebrities become familiar to us. When a familiar face promotes a product, it makes it seem as if the product itself is familiar, which makes people more likely to buy it. Even though we’ve never met them, the brain regards familiar celebrities the same way it does people who are actually familiar and trustworthy to us in real life. And the brain loves familiar faces and lights up when we see one. The more familiar, such as your mom, the more the brain becomes active. Companies can’t, of course, get the endorsem*nt of everyone’s moms, but they can find a celebrity that does the trick.

Similarly, through simple transitive properties, an endorsem*nt by a high-quality person makes the product appear high quality. Endorsem*nts give a product some credentials. We assume a beautiful celebrity knows more about beauty products than we do, an athlete knows more about thirst-quenching beverages, and we may even assume that an actor who plays a doctor on TV is knowledgeable about drugs. I’m willing to bet that more people would line up to buy a prescription drug from George Clooney than from the surgeon generalbecause the brain has associated George Clooney with medical knowledge after seeing him as a doctor on the televisions series "ER" for more than a decade.

Because of the concept of familiarity, seeing a celebrity arouses our emotions. It connects us to the product and makes it memorable. Our emotions, more than any other thing, tend to drive our decisions. So if you want someone to buy something, you have to appeal to his or her senses.

But there are important caveats and limits.Advertising campaigns must be developed skillfully, or there’s a risk that the viewer remembers the celebrity, not the product. Worse still, there’s a risk of a celebrity’s negative attributes or misalignment tearing down the brand. An inauthentic endorsem*nt is worse than no endorsem*nt at all. Samsung spokespersons Manny Pacquaio and David Beckham have been caught using other brands of phones.

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Partly for these reasons, some research suggests that, as a whole, celebrity endorsem*nt power has weakened in recent years. After all, if the brain treats celebrities as trusted, familiar friends, it will also treat being burned by a celebrity as if it has been burned by a trusted, familiar friend. Those types of negative emotions make an impact on our brains and are enormously difficult to overcome.

Companies have evolved as a result to engaging celebrities as founders, owners, and shareholders. In doing so, they better align their brand to the individuals promoting them and allow for greater authenticity. Whether Jessica Alba’s The Honest Company, or Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP, or Gwen Stefani’s L.A.M.B., the message and the messenger are one.

As a consumer, understanding how celebrity influences the brain is a powerful anecdote to their overall impact on your decisions. Ask yourself if you would drink that tequila if George Clooney wasn’t the owner or if you would buy that necklace if Angelina Jolie wasn’t wearing it. Ask yourself if you would wear that lipstick if Kylie Jenner’s name wasn’t on it, or if you would take that advice if it wasn’t coming from Oprah.

And for goodness sake, they are people too—go hug a celebrity.

Jeff Stibel is vice chairman of Dun & Bradstreet, a partner of Bryant Stibel and an entrepreneur who also happens to be a brain scientist. He is the USA TODAYbestselling author ofBreakpointandWired for Thought. Follow him on Twitter at @stibel.