24-08-2012, 10:17 AM
IMPACT OF CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS ON OVERALL BRAND
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Introduction
If the world were full of all wise men and all wise women; we would have never heard of a term called "advertisement". And then good products would have found the right customers and grown to prosperity. Firms would have worked out a mathematical formula to sell and succeed. But the buying process isn't rational; and so is this world.
Today, the business firms are trying out different ways in advertisement to increase their sales. Indians are die-hard movie and sport buffs; and this aspect of the consumers has invited the concept of "Celebrity Endorsement" to the world of advertisement. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of Celebrity Endorsement in the process of brand-building by taking appropriate examples from the advertising landscape.
The modern world of marketing communication has become colorful and inundated with advertisements, and it is hard to get noticed. It is an uphill task for the designer of an advertising campaign to differentiate itself from others and attract viewers' attention. In this jet age, people tend to ignore all commercials and advertisements while flipping through the magazines and newspapers or viewing TV. But even then, the glamour of a celebrity seldom goes unnoticed. Thus, celebrity endorsement in advertisement and its impact on the overall brand is of great significance. In this process, the companies hire celebrities from a particular field to feature in its advertisement campaigns. The promotional features and images of the product are matched with the celebrity image, which tends to persuade a consumer to fix up his choice from a plethora of brands. Although this sounds pretty simple, but the design of such campaigns and the subsequent success in achieving the desired result calls for an in-depth understanding of the product, the brand objective, choice of a celebrity, associating the celebrity with the brand, and a framework for measuring the effectiveness.
Definition of Celebrities
Celebrities are people who enjoy specific public recognition by a large number of certain groups of people. They have some characteristic attributes like attractiveness, extraordinary lifestyle or special skills that are not commonly observed. Thus, it can be said that within a society, celebrities generally differ from the common people and enjoy a high degree of public awareness. Among the classic forms of celebrities, actors (e.g., Shahrukh Khan, Amitabh Bachhan, etc.), models (e.g., Malaika Arora, Bipasha Basu, etc.), sports-persons (e.g., Sachin Tendulkar, Sania Mirza, etc.) are significant. According to Friedman and Friedman, a "celebrity endorser is an individual who is known by the public for his or her achievements in areas other than that of the product class endorsed". Compared to other endorser types, famous people always attach a greater degree of attention, recall and loyalty.
According to Melissa St. James, a doctoral fellow and marketing instructor at The George Washington University, "Studies show that using celebrities can increase consumers' awareness of the ad, capture [their] attention and make ads more memorable."
In this age of intense competition, where capturing a position in the consumers' mind space is extremely tough, celebrity endorsements give an extra edge to the companies for holding the viewers' attention. Celebrities can catalyze brand acceptance and provide the enormous momentum that brands require by endorsing the intrinsic value to the brand.
Important Celebrity Attributes
While selecting a celebrity as endorser, the company has to decide the promotional objective of the brand and how far the celebrity image matches with it. The selection is in fact a collaboration, from which both the company and the celebrity gains.
The most important attribute for a celebrity endorser is the trustworthiness. The target audience must trust that a celebrity carries a particular image and it must match with the product.
The second attribute in order of importance is likeability. The celebrity also must be accepted as a popular icon by a large cross section of the audience.
Companies use celebrity endorser because they are considered to have stopping power, i.e., a celebrity can be a very useful tool to draw attention to advertising messages in a cluttered media environment. The overall popular image coupled with exact product-image match enhances the consumer attention resulting in greater brand recall.
Similarity between the target audience and the celebrity is the third important attribute. A person well-known in a society can have greater impact than a celebrity of a different world. If the endorser and receiver have similar needs, goals, interests and lifestyles, the position advocated by the brand communication is better understood and received. Similarity is also used to create a situation where the consumer feels empathy for the person shown in the commercial. The bond of similarity between the endorser and the receiver increases the level of persuasiveness.
Branding & Celebrity Endorsement
Indian firms have been juxtaposing their brands with celebrity endorsers in the hope that celebrities may boost effectiveness of their marketing and/or corporate communication attempts. Today, use of celebrities as part of marketing communication strategy is fairly common practice for major firms in supporting corporate or brand imagery.
What is a Brand?
Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, once said, "Our most valuable assets are our intangible assets." The intangible asset he was referring to is a brand. The Dictionary of Business & Management defines a brand as: a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify goods or services of one seller or a group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitor.
The Need for Celebrity Endorsement
The charisma of the celebrities almost always entices people and their words are worshipped by a lot of people. Their influence also goes on the political front, where they are invited for political endorsement. The business firms, thus, resort to celebrity endorsement to perk up brand recall and product sales. This has now become a trend and is being perceived as a strategic means of brand building exercise.
The Elaboration Likelihood Model (EML) suggests that consumers will scrutinize claims more in important situations (say, life saving drugs) than in unimportant ones. So, for almost similar products like Coke and Pepsi, it makes sense to use endorsement. Also, Friedman & Friedman have shown that a celebrity relative to a non-celebrity spokesperson would be more effective for products high in psychological or social risk, involving such elements as good taste, self-image, and opinion of others. For example, when actor Shah Rukh Khan endorses Santro-Zip drive; the consumers are made to think that he is giving his opinion to go for this car.
Two reasons why advertisers need celebrity endorsement are to increase the credibility & attractiveness of their advertisement. This is solely to affect consumers' attitude towards their brand. To justify this hypothesis, we can take the example of former Miss Universe Sushmita Sen who helped the Epson brand of printers achieve instant recognition; even with the established giants like Hewlett-Packard and Wipro in the running. Similarly, actress Rani Mukherjee has turned the tables for Bata's ladies footwear brand called Sundrop as sales increased by a whooping 500%.
The Importance of Celebrity Management
In a world full of faces, the ones' which bolt from the blue are perhaps of the celebrities. The advertisers are always on the look out for such faces for the purpose of endorsement. But, the major challenge before them is to find the right faces for their brands or in other words celebrity management. McCraken quotes, "In the best of all possible worlds, the marketing or advertising firm first would determine the symbolic properties sought for the product... It would then consult a roster of celebrities and the meanings they made available, and taking into account budget and availability constraints, would choose the celebrity who best represents the appropriate symbolic properties." This suggests that the image of the celebrity must fit or be congruent with the product which can be explained from the theoretical perspective using a social cognition framework.
The Solutions
As discussed, celebrity management is very crucial to avoid the brand-celebrity disconnect, and subsequently, brand failures. Proper market research should be carried out and right positioning strategies should be in place. If the consumers have questions in their minds regarding the quality or performance of the product then even God cannot save the brand. There shouldn't be any ambiguity or confusions when showing the celebrity in the advertisement. The obvious solution to the problem of overshadowing is to make sure that both the advertisement and the celebrity are focused on the brand or product. To avoid any bad publicity arising out of celebrity defames, companies may resort to multiple celebrity endorsement. For Example: Pepsi while capitalizing on the popularity of cricket and films in India used several cricketers and film stars in their ads. So when Azharuddin and Jadeja got embroiled in the match-fixing controversy, Pepsi severed its association only with these stars, but its relationship with cricket continued.