The spread of COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted severe blows on the global
hospitality industry. In Taiwan, revenue from the food and beverage (F&B)
department has decreased by more than 90%. This study aims to understand whether
celebrity chefs can effectively help and enhance their corporates’ business
performance under COVID-19′s severe impacts via leveraging their personal brand
value, explores the influence of a celebrity chef on customer repurchase
behavior during the epidemic and examines whether such a chef has a mediation
effect on the relationship between corporate brand and customer satisfaction.
The primary data were collected from the respondents through online
questionnaire in Taiwan to get 245 respondents as a sample size of the research
from Nov. 10 to Nov. 25 in 2021, and through validity and reliability analysis
that processed by statistical software using factor analysis and structural
equation modeling to see if celebrity chefs’ personality branding could
influence customer repurchase behavior, and also examine the relationship
between corporate brand and celebrity chef. The findings show that corporate
brand enhances both a celebrity chef’s personal brand and customer satisfaction,
and that a celebrity chef has a positive effect on both customer satisfaction
and loyalty, which can partially mediate the effect of corporate brand;
furthermore, a celebrity chef has a positive effect on customer repurchase
behavior. In Taiwan relative studies into aspects of a celebrity chef’s effect
on consumer behavior are limited, and so this research offers new insights into
the celebrity chef phenomenon there as well as elsewhere.