Advertising & Celebrity Endorsement: Here is how You should select your Celebrity

In this article I will discuss

1. What essential factors you need to consider while selecting a celebrity for brand endorsement.
2. What you need to know about Marketing Experts when it comes to advertising (esp. using celebrity endorsement),
3. How can you make your Marketing Team more creative, more effective when it comes to differentiating in the ever increasing advertising clutter.

If what concluded by Morgan in his research paper is true “Marketing is all about advertising, nothing else” (1) then I would suggest, advertising is all about celebrity endorsements because “On global scale roughly one out of every five ads includes a celebrity, making endorsements a widely used and popular strategy among marketers to promote consumer products and services” (2).

Now if almost every enterprise, small medium business, organization around the world is utilizing celebrity endorsement as means to achieve its goals, it means one thing, it is working!

Now the next logical question would be, how can you utilize this approach to the benefit of your business, enterprise ?

Well to answer that I have identified some key factors that one needs to consider while selecting a celebrity to endorse ones brand. And if you consider these factors with utmost diligence during your selection of a given celebrity, I can promise you, you won’t regret it!

Seven Essential Factors You need to consider while selecting a Celebrity

1.      Familiarity
2.      Relevance
3.      Credibility
4.      Uniqueness
5.      Public Face
6.      Expert Help
7.      Creativity

Familiarity

Means how much target market is familiar with a given celebrity, does a given celebrity has huge fan base and is that fan base also happens to be your target market, how does your target audience generally perceive him/her etc.

Relevance

Means that there should be a link between the Endorser and the product as well between the Endorser and the target audience or in other words the endorser should “fit” the product in the perceptions of the target market.

For instance you want to target Soccer lovers and so you go for Cristiano Ronaldo to endorse your brand (soccer related brand), in this example your brand has link with the endorser and the endorser has link with the target audience, that link is soccer.

Credibility

Means credibility of an endorser in eyes of the target audience, do they adore him/her, do they have utmost respect for him/her etc

Uniqueness

How unique he/she is when it comes to other similar celebrities, do they (target audience) consider him second to none? And how that uniqueness affects his fan base, your target audience.

Public Face

Means the public self-image that your target market wants to claim for itself (3), like how they want to be perceived by society, their social circles etc. And is that public face similar to that of endorser, how much or how little etc

The more your target audience public face matches with that of the endorser, the better!

For more on Public Face read Understand Customers public face to convince them effectively

Expert Help

By utilizing Expert help in the field can help you getting even better celebrity for the job. Remember being reluctant to recruit/hire Experts can have serious consequences for your enterprise, business that includes no or limited growth, increasing expenses and business demise in worst case scenario (4).

And since the ultimate goal of any enterprise, business is to increase sales of their products/services; research shows that most of these “Experts” esp. in marketing (especially advertising experts) are often uncertain of how their efforts in advertising can result in increase in sales (5).

So you need to be really careful when it comes to hiring/recruiting Experts because success of your whole advertising campaign via celebrity endorsing depends on these Experts, now there is another problem that makes this whole situation even more complex to tackle.

That is considering the enormity of advertising clutter and the fact that consumers often devote limited resources to processing ad information (6) it has become almost impossible for Marketing Experts to capture audience attention, to differentiate.

That means your Experts are required to be immensely creative in their approach to advertising, in utilizing celebrity as an endorser to capture audience attention, to differentiate and studies have shown over and over that creativity and innovation are crucial for organizations/enterprises to succeed (7) (8).

And to light the brains of your Experts with creativity you need to put them in teams, as research shows creativity, innovation can be brought about by taking team approach to a given situation (9).

Kindly for more understanding read the related material on this blog and articles mentioned in references down below and if you have something to share, then I am eagerly waiting!

And yeah don't forget to subscribe!

 

References:

1.      Morgan, R.E. (1996), “Conceptual foundations of marketing and marketing theory”, Management Decision, Vol. 34 No. 10, pp. 19-26.

2.      Halonen-Knight, E. and Hurmerinta, L. (2010), “Who endorses whom? Meaning transfer in celebrity endorsement”, Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 19 No. 6, pp. 452-60.

3.      Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1978) Universals in language use: politeness phenomena. In Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction (ed. by E.N. Goody), pp. 56–289. Cambridge University Press, New York.

4.      Sean Ennis, (1999),"Growth and the small firm: using causal mapping to assess the decision-making process- a case study", Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, Vol. 2 Iss: 2 pp. 147 – 160

5.      Herbert Jack Rotfeld, (2009),"The marketing myths and consumers' fear of marketing", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 26 Iss: 5 pp. 309 - 310

6.      Christine Moorman, and Bernard J. Jaworski (1991), "Enhancing and Measuring Consumers Motivation, Opportunity, and Ability to Process Brand Information From Ads," Journal of Marketing, 4 (October), 32-53.

7.      Dougherty, D. (2006) Organizing for innovation in the 21st century. In Clegg, S., Hardy, C., Lawrence, T. and Nord, W.R. (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies. Sage Publications, London, pp. 598–617.

8.      Arthur D. Little. (2004) Innovation Excellence Studie 2004. Arthur D. Little, Wiesbaden.

9.      Pirola-Merlo, A. and Mann, L. (2004) The Relationship between Individual Creativity and Team Creativity: Aggregating across People and Time. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 25, 235–57. type/right