by Celebrity branding or celebrity endorsement is a form of advertising campaign or marketing strategy used by brands, companies, or a non-profit organization which involves celebrities or a well-known person using their social status or their fame to help promote a product, service or even raise awareness on environmental or social matters. Marketers use celebrity endorsers in hopes that the positive images of the celebrity endorser of the brand will also be passed on to the products or the brand image associated with the celebrities. Celebrity endorsement is usually commonly used by fashion or beauty brands, but a non-profit organization relies on celebrities as well, as celebrities have mass communication skills which can attract people’s attention and is helpful in reaching a wider audience to raise their awareness towards a certain organization or an issue, thus making celebrities effective fundraisers.
Infomercials are an advertisement technique that is usually produced and paid for by a company seeking to promote its products and services. The effect of infomercials, once they reach the target market, has been quite successful and so persuasive in most countries. Today most celebrities are keen on endorsing a product for which they are paid a high amount of money. Firms put loads of money in partnering their brands with qualities such as attractiveness, amiability, and dependability.
But why endorse a product which one has not even used yet? For starters, customers derive a certain fulfillment for products endorsed by their favorite celebrities. Some would just prefer to buy a product or utilize a service endorsed by a celebrity. It is for these reasons that most companies today believe and trust that the endorsement of their products by a well-known celebrity will help sell their goods and services.
Celebrity endorsements are used by countless businesses of all shapes and sizes as a marketing strategy. While some critics state that they have little positive impact on business sales, others assert that by using them, the benefits that a company can enjoy are countless.
Here is a few reason why you should employ celebrity endorsement as a marketing strategy for your products or services.
It enhances the credibility of a business
Companies enjoy enhanced credibility by choosing and endorsing the right celebrities for their products. Celebrities have their specialized niche which ranges from music and film, fitness, fashion, sports, etc. Therefore, as a business, you ought to take advantage of this and hire a celebrity whose specialization is in line with the product or service you seek to endorse. For example, a fitness trainer or author will work well at endorsing a health and fitness product or service.
So note that customers will take your business and product more seriously if the right celebrity endorses your product.
It boasts a business brand awareness
Without a doubt, celebrities are good at networking, and they also enjoy easy access to a broad network. These are persons that love to take pictures which are often spread across magazines, blogs, social media, etc. This, therefore, means that using a well-known celebrity will significantly boost your brand in your target market and beyond.
In this regard, choosing a celebrity to endorse your products could be great as this will give your product the ultimate exposure across the market. For example, if you design and sell a waist trainer and a celebrity is seen training with one of these, fitness enthusiast will want to know more about the waist trainer and the brand. Before you know it, prospective customers will be calling, tweeting and messaging asking to learn more about the product and how they can get it. Ultimately, this relates to increased brand awareness as well increased sales.
Great promotional tool
Last but not least, celebrity endorsements tend to add significant value to a company’s PR as it quickly attracts the attention of paparazzi and the media in general. As a business, the greatest tactic you can use to promote your product is by getting a celebrity to talk about it. When a celebrity does this, your product will receive media hype and lots of attention from the general public. Without all these, your company runs the risk of staying in the shadows and losing out on hugely profitable sales.
Marketing implications of Celebrity Endorsement
A celebrity endorsement provides an alternative to creative ads. Where creative ads are more prone towards logic or humour, celebrity endorsements mainly focus on the strengths of the celebrity and more often, it mainly tends to make the celebrity speak directly to the public “I use this brand, do you” and in essence the celebrity is speaking to his loyalists “I am using this brand and so should you”.
However, the marketer also has to take care about the reputation of the endorser and should prefer to stay with a celebrity which has a stable image and not that the image of the celebrity changes every few weeks. Michael jordan, Sachin Tendulkar and Michael Schumacher are celebrities whose images are stable and are hard to change. Thus for leading organizations, they are one of the most preferable endorsers.
Celebrity reach
Celebrity branding or celebrity endorsement of a company’s product is effective largely because celebrities have the potential to reach a large number of prospective consumers.
Reach can be loosely defined as the number of people that have seen and/or heard the brand’s intended message at least once (Belch & Belch, 2012). If a brand or company decides to use celebrity branding to market their product, it is highly probable that they are deciding to attempt to reach the largest assortment of potential consumers possible, rather than reaching a small number of consumers but more frequently which is described as frequency (Belch & Belch, 2012).
An example of the usefulness of a celebrity’s reach can be shown in statistics taken from telegraph.co.uk regarding the world’s most followed Instagram celebrities. The most followed Instagram celebrity is Cristiano Ronaldo, with each post that he makes being viewed by all or most of his 192 million followers. Selena Gomez is 2nd, with 164 million followers, and Ariana Grande is 3rd with 116 million followers. A direct brand endorsement from one of these celebrities would be significant were they to post a picture with the company’s product encouraging their followers to go out and purchase it, and this is on Instagram alone. Imagine the effect of a celebrity posting an endorsement across all of their social media, (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.). The reach that an A-list celebrity has possesses the ability to reach millions of potential consumers, and as a result can be an incredibly effective way to boost sales, or at the very least get a brand’s name out there in a wider audience than before.
Advantages
- Celebrity endorsements can build brand equity. An example of this is Nike, prior to Michael Jordan Nike mostly sponsored tennis and track athletes and decided to expand their market, which increased sales to become a multibillion-dollar company.
- Celebrity endorsement is used as an advertising strategy, by using celebrity status and image, to promote a brand’s recognition, recall, and differentiation.
- It helps customers to remember advertisements when seeing a celebrity that has already got a brand of their own, it will bring customers to try or purchase the product.
- It also helps the brand to stand out over a brand that does not use celebrity branding.
- Increased attention to the product and the brand
- Polishing the image of the brand
- Introduction of the brand to new and wider market
- Repositioning of the brand
- Guarantee of successful advertising of the brand
