The Relationship between Advertising by Celebrities and the Willingness to Purchase Sports Shoes

Advertising has always played an important role in growing process of various products and celebrities attract more people to sport and sports goods purchase. This research studied the relationship between advertisement by celebrities and the willingness to buy sports shoes in Tabriz. This survey was conducted through a researcher-made questionnaire. The validity of this questionnaire was confirmed by professors and the reliability was confirmed as α=0.93 using Cronbach''s alpha. The sample consisted of 600 customers of sports shoes determined by Cochran formula. The data were first arranged using descriptive statistics and then analyzed using Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Pearson correlation coefficient (α=0.01). The results showed a positive and significant relationship between the employment of sports celebrities and customers willingness to buy sports shoes (r=0.75). The coefficient of determination (r=0.56) showed that the employment of celebrities had a relationship with 56% of variance of dependent variable (i.e. willingness to buy sports shoes).