How stars’ persona reformulations shape audience preferences: insights from ERP evidence

Stars are valuable to the entertainment industry, but their value is not persistent. This contradiction prompts stars to undergo persona reformulations to maintain popularity and extend their careers. While existing research has focused on strategies for achieving effective persona reformulations, less attention has been paid to how audiences perceive these strategies, an essential aspect of evaluating their success. This study investigates how audiences perceive two primary persona reformulation paths—wen and wu—for young male stars, as well as the underlying mechanisms. The wen path emphasizes the enhancement of intellectual attributes, while the wu path focuses on physical strength. Our findings reveal that the wen path generally outperforms the wu path in improving audience evaluations of stars. Specifically, the wen path significantly increases preference among low-preference audiences but shows only a positive, nonsignificant trend among high-preference audiences. In contrast, the wu path leads to significant declines in the preferences of high-preference audiences. Moreover, event-related potential (ERP) analysis reveals that the wu path captures greater audience attention, as reflected by increased P2 amplitudes, whereas the wen path triggers stronger stereotype conflict, associated with heightened N4 amplitudes. These effects are more pronounced among audiences with high (vs. low) pre-existing preferences for stars. Additionally, the wu path evokes stronger emotional arousal in audiences, regardless of whether their pre-existing preferences are high or low, as indicated by increased late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes. Our findings offer practical insights for stars and entertainment managers on achieving successful persona reformulations, particularly in leveraging the wen and wu reformulation paths.