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This study aims to explore the relative effectiveness of a human celebrity endorser vis‐à‐vis a fictional celebrity or character endorser on teenage consumers' attitudes. Further, the study also seeks to assess whether the effectiveness varies depending on the nature of the product being endorsed.

Given the purpose of the study, experimental design was used as the research methodology. In an experimental set‐up three product categories (low‐involvement food/low‐involvement non‐food/high‐involvement) and two endorsers (human celebrity/fictional celebrity) and a control group were deployed in a 3×3 full factorial design on 378 teenagers. Fictitious advertisements were used as stimuli.

The study suggests that, for food and non‐food low‐involvement product categories, the impact of a human celebrity is more than that of a fictional celebrity. Regarding the purchase intentions of teenagers, it was found that a human celebrity is more effective than a fictional celebrity in food and non‐food low‐involvement products. In the case of the high‐involvement product, the human celebrity was not found to create favorable consumer attitudes.

The study results suggest that celebrity endorsements are useful, but the nature of the product also has an influence on success. One limitation of the study was the restriction to print advertisements.

A major implication from the findings for the managers is that a human celebrity may not always be the right choice for any product promotion for teenagers. More specifically, for high‐involvement products, celebrity endorsement needs to be handled with caution since it may not prove to be successful.

The contribution of the study is in addressing an area that has not been very well researched as yet, and in addressing a research question that has not been investigated properly.

With increasing use of explicit comparative advertisement to get share of consumers’ mind and influence their purchase decision in western context, the same is now used extensively in emerging markets like India. However, there has not been sufficient research to understand the effectiveness of explicit comparative advertisement in low and high-involvement product categories. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to attempt to understand the effectiveness of explicit comparative advertising on consumers’ attitude and purchase intention (PI) towards high and low-involvement products.

The study carried out experimental treatments with 2 × 2 factorial design among 200 Indian young consumers who were in the age group 18-25. The independent variables were product categories and type of advertising (comparative and non-comparative) and dependent variables were consumer attitude and PIs.

It was found that the comparative form of advertisement developed favourable response towards the advertisement, rather than towards the brand or PI.

The study found that comparative advertising is effective for high as well as low-involvement product category in changing the consumer’s attitude towards the advertisement. The research has used print media for conducting the experiment.

It can be inferred that comparisons should be supplemented with additional information in the form of the unique features and associated emotions and feeling of the product in order to develop favourable attitude towards the brand and PI.

Comparative advertising is a growing domain and there has been very little contribution by the researchers specially on high and low-involvement product categories.