Exploring the challenges facing female athletes as endorsers

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate some of the potential reasons why female athletes, despite increases in female sport participation, are less commonly used as endorsers than male athletes. Using a combination of McCracken's meaning transfer model and three dimensions of source attractiveness, familiarity, likability and similarity, preliminary results indicate that female consumers find female athletes to be less effective endorsers due to low familiarity and because they are low in similarity and liking. The relative lack of effectiveness also appears to be attributed to a disconnection between stages 2 and 3 of the meaning transfer model because of the way athlete associations are transferred to the product during stage 2 as well as the transfer of meaning to the consumer in stage 3. This appears to be true, at least in part, due to the way advertisers assign and transfer meaning among the endorser, brand and consumer. An example of this is when ads result in lower liking of the endorser due to negative feelings generated from comparisons made by female consumers to the female endorser.