Celebrity Gossip Consumption: Novel Antecedents and Consequences

Celebrity gossip, defined broadly as speculative media content about celebrities’ personal lives, is heavily understudied in the fields of marketing and consumer research. The current dissertation is an attempt to fill this void by examining some novel antecedents and marketing/consumer-relevant consequences of reading/watching celebrity gossip. The first essay looks at the consumption of celebrity gossip as a previously unexplored form of compensatory behavior exhibited subconsciously by individuals particularly in response to social exclusion threats. The second essay investigates how the valence of gossip stories about celebrities can impact the celebrities’ persuasiveness as endorsers for vice versus virtue products.