The impact of moderately incongruent rap music endorsers on luxury brand personality and brand coolness

Luxury brand personality relies heavily on positive spillover effects from celebrity endorsers. However, the extent to which surprising or even moderately incongruent endorsements might either help a luxury brand’s personality to enrich its current brand perception towards not-yet-considered brand personality attributes or deteriorate an existing luxury brand personality is not yet fully exploited. For instance, the luxury industry is increasingly choosing rap-music artists as the new faces of their famous brands, and consumers appear to react positively to such apparently conflicting alliances. Against this background, here we present insights from research based on two experiments on the impact of urban rap music artists on key dimensions of luxury brand personality and brand coolness. Our findings provide important managerial as well as theoretical insights – typically for luxury brands that regularly need to expand their brand personality dimensions in order to capture more consumers and remain attractive for new and younger consumer groups.