Сelebrity trends in advertising

Watching celebrity trends in advertising over the past twenty years, I have seen original ideas, copycats, fads, good campaigns, bad campaigns, celebrity use for the sake of celebrity use, and good, solid creative benefiting from the inclusion of the RIGHT celebrity to promote an idea or concept.

Marketers have been using celebrities in commercials, print campaigns and promotions for years, because done properly, it works. Celebrities get the viewer's attention; but whether they work to sell the product depends on proper celebrity casting. Selecting the right star to "pitch" your product means finding the person to whom your buyers can relate —  the person your buyer wants to believe. This doesn't sound too difficult, until you factor in that in many cases the right celebrity is not always a celebrity you can afford. On the flip side, the right celebrity is not always the most expensive one. It is important, above all else, to consider whether the celebrity you select is right for your campaign and take the process from there.

It's important to know what you want from a celebrity before you begin negotiations. That is why, when we work on behalf of an advertiser, even though it's not always easy for the advertiser to understand, we are insistent on identifying all of their needs prior to contacting the talent. On a recent commercial we cast for an insurance company, our client thought they were certain of the markets in which they wanted to air the spots, making it a regional campaign excluding major markets. The talent we secured was an astronaut, who we were able to get for a very reasonable amount of money because of the limited area of use. After the deal was negotiated, our client realized they needed to expand into additional regions, including major markets previously omitted. Fortunately, because of our strong relationship with the talent's agent, we were able to go back and renegotiate without a large financial "penalty" to the advertiser. But this is not always the case. The campaign was very successful, however, and they now have exercised an option, which we had pre-negotiated, to continue use of this celebrity into additional markets for an additional term.

Celebrity use often runs in clusters. You'll see a spurt of commercials utilizing sports personalities, then supermodels, then sitcom stars, etc. One advertiser's good idea creates a frenzy of interest in that type of celebrity for others to follow — and so it goes, until the next creative idea emerges. Try not to get caught up in this "trend-setting" circus — again, think about your product and its buyer in selecting your celebrity spokesperson.

With the proliferation of the Internet, a whole new arena has opened up for celebrity exposure. Many advertisers want to have the opportunity to include a star's image on their corporate websites, as well as sites designed to specifically promote a particular product. I would estimate that 50% of our recent negotiations included securing the rights for our clients to utilize celebrities on the Internet, even if the use was unspecified. I anticipate this will not continue to be easy to get, as the Internet has become a viable advertising medium in its own right.

There are unique challenges in utilizing a celebrity in advertising, and although most of the time there are only a few bumps on the way to the "deal," there are sometimes larger mountains to climb. We recently worked on behalf of a major auto manufacturer (General Motors) who was introducing a new model car, a sportier version of their brand, which previously appealed to an older buyer. The marketing firm planned a direct mail campaign, a sweepstakes of sorts, supported by mailers going into the home. We selected and secured a diverse group of talent — four different celebrities to appeal to the auto manufacturer's different market segments — and the photo session to create the direct mail piece was scheduled. One of the personalities, a basketball coach whose team was in the finals and who shall remain nameless, wreaked havoc on the best-laid plans. Less than a week before the photo session, his team won the championship and he decided, despite contracts already entered into, that his worth had now skyrocketed, and there was no way for our client to afford him. He was now sitting back and reviewing a multitude of better offers that appeared on his desk upon winning the coveted trophy. Fortunately, with the cooperation of the other talent, and a very understanding client, this piece of the puzzle was replaced and the campaign went on to be a successful effort. The moral of the story? Celebrities, like some other members of society, do not always have the integrity we'd hope. Flexibility, along with the ability to move quickly in a pinch, is often necessary when swimming in the shark-infested waters of celebrity advertising.

Celebrities in advertising is a marketing vehicle that will likely continue well into this new millenium, and as long as there continue to be new stars introduced into our entertainment arenas — with last season's stars being ushered out gracefully — there will be no shortage of talent to fill the need. Doing it right is the biggest challenge, a challenge that is answered in better response and higher sales volume. 
 

"A sign of a celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.”

- Daniel J Boorstin

INTRODUCTION

     The motif behind total branding may be decocted as an attempt to amalgamate diverse activities to win customer preference. Apropos to this context, the topic “Impact of celebrity endorsement on overall brand”, is a significant one. The crescendo of celebrities endorsing brands has been steadily increasing over the past years. Marketers overtly acknowledge the power of celebrities in influencing consumer-purchasing decisions. It is a ubiquitously accepted fact that celebrity endorsement can bestow special attributes upon a product that it may have lacked otherwise. But everything is not hunky-dory; celebrities are after all mere mortals made of flesh and blood like us. If a celebrity can aggrandize the merits of a brand, he or she can also exacerbate the image of a brand.

     If I may take the liberty of rephrasing Aristotle’s quote on anger, “Any brand can get a celebrity. That is easy. But getting a celebrity consistent with the right brand, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way... that is not easy.”

• Celebrity endorsements are impelled by virtue of the following motives:
• Instant Brand Awareness and Recall.
• Celebrity values define, and refresh the brand image.
• Celebrities add new dimensions to the brand image.
• Instant credibility or aspiration PR coverage.
• Lack of ideas.
• Convincing clients.

The scope of a celebrity on the incumbent brand:

Simply stating, a brand is a differentiated product and helps in identifying your product and making it stand out due to its name, design, style, symbol, color combination, or usually a mix of all these.

Before we can scrutinize the effects of celebrity endorsement on the overall brand, we have to ferret the implicit nuances that act as sources of strong brand images or values:

• Experience of use: This encapsulates familiarity and proven reliability.
• User associations: Brands acquire images from the type of people who are seen using them. Images of prestige or success are imbibed when brands are associated with glamorous personalities.
• Belief in efficiency: Ranking from consumer associations, newspaper editorials etc.
• Brand appearance: Design of brand offers clues to quality and affects preferences.
• Manufacturer’s name & reputation: A prominent brand name (Sony,Kellogg’s,Bajaj,Tata) transfers positive associations

   The realm of the celebrity’s impact is confined to bestow a distinctive identity and provide AV to the brand; the celebrity does not have the power to improve or debilitate the efficiency and features of the core product. Thus, we are gradually approaching an evident proposition claiming,

“The health of a brand can definitely be improved up to some extent by celebrity endorsement. But one has to remember that endorsing a celebrity is a means to an end and not an end in itself.”

    An appropriately used celebrity can prove to be a massively powerful tool that magnifies the effects of a campaign. But the aura of cautiousness should always be there. The fact to be emphasised is that celebrities alone do not guarantee success, as consumers nowadays understand advertising. They know what advertising is and how it works. People realize that celebrities are being paid a lot of money for endorsements and this knowledge makes them cynical about celebrity endorsements. 

Compatibility of the celebrity’s persona with the overall brand image

    A celebrity is used to impart credibility and aspirational values to a brand, but the celebrity needs to match the product. A good brand campaign idea and an intrinsic link between the celebrity and the message are musts for a successful campaign. Celebrities are no doubt good at generating attention, recall and positive attitudes towards advertising provided that they are supporting a good idea and there is an explicit fit between them and the brand. On the other hand, they are rendered useless when it comes to the actual efficiency of the core product, creating positive attitudes to brands, purchase intentions and actual sales. 
 

Certain parameters that postulate compatibility between the celebrity and brand image are:

• Celebrity’s fit with the brand image.
• Celebrity—Target audience match
• Celebrity associated values.
• Costs of acquiring the celebrity.
• Celebrity—Product match.
• Celebrity controversy risk.
• Celebrity popularity.
• Celebrity availability.
• Celebrity physical attractiveness.
• Celebrity credibility.
• Celebrity prior endorsements.
• Whether celebrity is a brand user.
• Celebrity profession.

Some Global Examples:

Globally, firms have been juxtaposing their brands and themselves with celebrity endorsers. Some successful ongoing global endorsements are as follows:

• Celebrity endorsements have been the bedrock of Pepsi's advertising. Over the years, Pepsi has used and continues to use a number of celebrities for general market and targeted advertising, including Shaquille O'Neal, Mary J. Blige, Wyclef Jean, and Busta Rhymes, who did a targeted campaign for their Mountain Dew product.
• George Foreman for Meineke. He has also sold more than 10 million Lean Mean Fat-- Reducing Grilling Machines since signing with the manufacturing company.
• James Earl Jones for Verizon and CNN.
• Nike golf balls, since the company signed Tiger Woods in 1996, have seen a $50 million revenue growth. Nike's golf line grossed more than $250 million in annual sales. In 2000 he renegotiated a five-year contract estimated at $125 million.
• Other successful endorsements like Nike—Michael Jordan, Dunlop—John McEnroe, Adidas—Prince Naseem Hamed, and so on.
• Venus Williams, tennis player and Wimbledon champion has signed a five-year $40 million contract with sportswear manufacturer Reebok International Inc.

Advantages of a celebrity endorsing a Brand

Brands have been leveraging celebrity appeal for a long time. Across categories, whether in products or services, more and more brands are banking on the mass appeal of celebrities. As soon as a new face ascends the popularity charts, advertisers queue up to have it splashed all over. Witness the spectacular rise of Sania Mirza and Irfan Pathan in endorsements in a matter of a few months. The accruement of celebrity endorsements can be justified by the following advantages that are bestowed on the overall brand:

1. Establishment of Credibility: Approval of a brand by a star fosters a sense of trust for that brand among the target audience- this is especially true in case of new products. We had the Shah Rukh-Santro campaign. At launch, Shah Rukh Khan endorsed Santro and this ensured that brand awareness was created in a market, which did not even know the brand.
2. Ensured Attention: Celebrities ensure attention of the target group by breaking the clutter of advertisements and making the ad and the brand more noticeable.
3. PR coverage : is another reason for using celebrities. Managers perceive celebrities as topical, which create high PR coverage. A good example of integrated celebrity campaigns is one of the World’s leading pop groups, the Spice Girls, who have not only appeared in advertisements for Pepsi, but also in product launching and PR events. Indeed, celebrity-company marriages are covered by most media from television to newspapers (e.g. The Spice Girls and Pepsi)
4. Higher degree of recall: People tend to commensurate the personalities of the celebrity with the brand thereby increasing the recall value. Golf champion Tiger Woods has endorsed American Express, Rolex, and Nike. Actress Catherine Zeta-Jones is used by T-Mobile and Elizabeth Arden. 007 Pierce Brosnan promotes Omega, BMW, and Noreico.
5. Associative Benefit: A celebrity’s preference for a brand gives out a persuasive message - because the celebrity is benefiting from the brand, the consumer will also benefit.
6. Mitigating a tarnished image: Cadbury India wanted to restore the consumer's confidence in its chocolate brands following the high-pitch worms controversy; so the company appointed Amitabh Bachchan for the job. Last year, when the even more controversial pesticide issue shook up Coca-Cola and PepsiCo and resulted in much negative press, both soft drink majors put out high-profile damage control ad films featuring their best and most expensive celebrities. While Aamir Khan led the Coke fightback as an ingenious and fastidious Bengali who finally gets convinced of the product's `purity,' PepsiCo brought Shah Rukh Khan and Sachin Tendulkar together once again in a television commercial which drew references to the `safety' of the product indirectly.
7. Psychographic Connect: Celebrities are loved and adored by their fans and advertisers use stars to capitalise on these feelings to sway the fans towards their brand.
8. Demographic Connect: Different stars appeal differently to various demographic segments (age, gender, class, geography etc.).
9. Mass Appeal: Some stars have a universal appeal and therefore prove to be a good bet to generate interest among the masses.
10. Rejuvenating a stagnant brand: With the objective of infusing fresh life into the stagnant chyawanprash category and staving off competition from various brands, Dabur India roped in Bachchan for an estimated Rs 8 crore.
11. Celebrity endorsement can sometimes compensate for lack of innovative ideas.

Disadvantages of a celebrity endorsing a brand:

The celebrity approach has a few serious risks:

• The reputation of the celebrity may derogate after he/she has endorsed the product: Pepsi Cola's suffered with three tarnished celebrities - Mike Tyson, Madonna, and Michael Jackson. Since the behaviour of the celebrities reflects on the brand, celebrity endorsers may at times become liabilities to the brands they endorse.
• The vampire effect: This terminology pertains to the issue of a celebrity overshadowing the brand. If there is no congruency between the celebrity and the brand, then the audience will remember the celebrity and not the brand. Examples are the campaigns of Dawn French—Cable Association and Leonard Rossiter—Cinzano. Both of these campaigns were aborted due to celebrities getting in the way of effective communication. Another example could be the Castrol commercial featuring Rahul Dravid.
• Inconsistency in the professional popularity of the celebrity: The celebrity may lose his or her popularity due to some lapse in professional performances. For example, when Tendulkar went through a prolonged lean patch recently, the inevitable question that cropped up in corporate circles - is he actually worth it? The 2003 Cricket World Cup also threw up the Shane Warne incident, which caught Pepsi off guard. With the Australian cricketer testing positive for consuming banned substances and his subsequent withdrawal from the event, bang in the middle of the event, PepsiCo - the presenting sponsor of the World Cup 2003 - found itself on an uneasy wicket
• Multi brand endorsements by the same celebrity would lead to overexposure: The novelty of a celebrity endorsement gets diluted if he does too many advertisements. This may be termed as commoditisation of celebrities, who are willing to endorse anything for big bucks. Example, MRF was among the early sponsors of Tendulkar with its logo emblazoned on his bat. But now Tendulkar endorses a myriad brands and the novelty of the Tendulkar-MRF campaign has scaled down.
• Celebrities endorsing one brand and using another (competitor): Sainsbury’s encountered a problem with Catherina Zeta Jones, whom the company used for its recipe advertisements, when she was caught shopping in Tesco. A similar case happened with Britney Spears who endorsed one cola brand and was repeatedly caught drinking another brand of cola on tape.
• Mismatch between the celebrity and the image of the brand: Celebrities manifest a certain persona for the audience. It is of paramount importance that there is an egalitarian congruency between the persona of the celebrity and the image of the brand. Each celebrity portrays a broad range of meanings, involving a specific personality and lifestyle. Madonna, for example, is perceived as a tough, intense and modern women associated with the lower middle class. The personality of Pierce Brosnan is best characterized as the perfect gentlemen, whereas Jennifer Aniston has the image of the ‘good girl from next door’.

CONCLUSION

Despite the obvious economic advantage of using relatively unknown personalities as endorsers in advertising campaigns, the choice of celebrities to fulfill that role has become common practice for brands competing in today's cluttered media environment. There are several reasons for such extensive use of celebrities. Because of their high profile, celebrities may help advertisements stand out from the surrounding clutter, thus improving their communicative ability. Celebrities may also generate extensive PR leverage for brands. For example, when Revlon launched the "Won't kiss off test" for its Colorstay lipsticks in 1994 with Cindy Crawford kissing reporters, the campaign featured on almost every major news channel and equally widely in the press. A brief assessment of the current market situation indicates, that celebrity endorsement advertising strategies can, under the right circumstances, indeed justify the high costs associated with this form of advertising.

But it would be presumptuous to consider celebrity endorsement as a panacea for all barricades. Celebrity endorsement if used effectively, makes the brand stand out, galvanizes brand recall and facilitates instant awareness. To achieve this, the marketer needs to be really disciplined in choice of a celebrity. Hence the right use of celebrity can escalate the Unique Selling Proposition of a brand to new heights; but a cursory orientation of a celebrity with a brand may prove to be claustrophobic for the brand. A celebrity is a means to an end, and not an end in himself/herself.