How a CEO's Personality, Performance, and Leadership Predict Advertising Credibility

This article conceptualizes chief executive officer (CEO) brand image as a multidimensional construct consisting of three main dimensions—personality, performance, and leadership—and develops a reliable and valid nine-item scale to capture these dimensions. The article adopts a grounded-theory approach to derive the dimensionality of the concept, then a rigorous scale-development procedure based on multiple empirical studies, with a total of 1,655 respondents. The article shows that CEO brand image is an independent construct that differs conceptually and empirically from CEO familiarity, corporate brand image, corporate brand reputation, and product brand awareness. It also reveals that in social-media advertising contexts, CEO brand image predicts the advertisement’s credibility and also mediates the relationship between the advertisement’s credibility and two antecedents: CEO brand familiarity and consumer attitude toward social-media advertisement.