What is source attractiveness? Does it relate to some products more than others?

Source attractiveness refers to the source's perceived social value. This quality can emanate from the person's physical appearance, personality, or social status, or from his or her similarity to the receiver (we like to listen to people who are like us). A compelling source has great value, and endorsement deals are constantly in the works. Even dead sources can be attractive: The great-grandson of the artist Renoir is putting his famous ancestor's name on bottled water, and the Picasso family licensed their name to the French automaker Citroën.
A physically attractive source tends to facilitate attitude change. His or her degree of attractiveness exerts at least a modest effect on consumers' purchase intentions or product evaluation.
As a result, physically attractive people often get a boost in life because people assume they excel in other dimensions as well. Occasionally this halo effect can backfire if observers infer that someone has exploited his or her attractiveness (e.g., women who are labelled as "gold diggers"). One study found that good-looking children are less likely to receive assistance from adults (at least for fairly mild problems) because people assume they are more competent and thus better able to help themselves. One implication of this work is that, ironically, charitable organizations may want to consider using less attractive kids as models to solicit donations! Psychologists also refer to the opposite-the forked-tail effect, which describes our assumptions that an unattractive person also isn't good at other things. Beauty can also function as a source of information. The effectiveness of highly attractive spokespeople in ads appears to be largely limited to those situations where the advertised product is overtly related to attractiveness or sexuality. The social adaptation perspective assumes that information seen to be instrumental in forming an attitude will be more heavily weighted by the perceiver; we filter out irrelevant information to minimize cognitive effort. Under the right circumstances, an endorser's level of attractiveness constitutes a source of information instrumental to the attitude-change process. An attractive spokesperson, for this reason, is more likely to be an effective source when the product is relevant to attractiveness. For example, attractiveness affects attitudes toward ads about perfume or cologne (where attractiveness is relevant) but not toward coffee ads, where attractiveness is not relevant.