How Celebrity Endorsements Change the Brain
This is a retelling, in our own words, of the BBC's report on the study.
Seeing a celebrity endorse a pair of shoes changes a woman's brain activity — even if she has no immediate urge to buy the shoes, a Dutch brain-imaging study suggested.
The researchers, led by Mirre Stallen of Erasmus University, scanned the brains of 24 women as they looked at 40 color photographs: famous and non-famous women, judged similarly attractive, wearing the same footwear.
When the women looked at a celebrity, the scans showed heightened activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex — a region associated with feeling affection. The same response did not appear for the attractive non-celebrities. Writing in the Journal of Economic Psychology, the team suggested that this activity links the celebrity with the product in a part of the brain tied to positive feeling, and that the link could be rapidly recalled — essentially, fame itself was doing the persuading.
"The enhanced memory performance for items that were encoded in the context of a famous individual can neither be explained by increased attractiveness of the celebrity nor by a higher level of perceived expertise, but only by the persuasiveness of fame itself," Stallen wrote — a direct quote from the published paper.
There was a twist, though. The number of women who said they would actually go out and buy the shoes did not differ significantly between the celebrity and non-celebrity photographs. The researchers stressed that the effect could still matter over the longer term — brand memory laid down now, purchase decision later — even if it didn't show up as an immediate desire to buy.
The team planned a follow-up study to investigate whether men were equally swayed by celebrity footwear endorsements.
Related Stories
Your brain on fiction: what neuroscience finds in a novel
Brain scans show novels light up more than the language centers — fiction trains empathy, simulates experience, and rewires how we understand others.
Archive: Insulting Women to Sell Them Shoes
In 2014, Suchitra Sharma called out shoe-sale ads that portrayed women as deal-obsessed dimwits. A prescient media critique, from the TI archives.
Does Google Profit From 'Accidental Clicks'? The Ad-Industry Debate
Critics argued Google's ad design profited from accidental mobile taps; Google pointed to its invalid-click filters. The debate over who audits the metrics.