Does celebrity endorsement make a difference in an ad? I thought not… till I experienced it for myself…
Navratna Oil – is ok if you haven’t even heard of it – moved steadily up my considered set of brands – from Govinda dancing (with starlet Rambha, ugh!) thanda thanda cool cool – yuck! what kind of a brand is this? through Saurav Ganguly playing with the bottle – hey, what is Ganguly doing here? this oil can’t be all that bad…. to Amitabh Bacchan – bye, I am off to buy the oil……. And I am not even in the market for hair-oils!
I am not joking. I suffer from migraines and when The Big B endorsed the oil (ok, ok, this is advertising – no need to get all wide-eyed and naive), I was suddenly ready to give it a shot.
Not to say that a celebrity always lends credibility to a brand or makes it suddenly more attractive… but do they ever?
– One, when the product category is relevant to you as the audience / consumer – you are in a receptive mode (me – anything for relief from this migraine).
– Or sometimes, when you least expect it. Like this case again. Having written off the brand as strongly Govinda-types (if you don’t know what I mean, is ok. Get on with life – you need to chill and watch more meaningless masala movies), seeing the more ‘credible’ faces of Ganguly and Bacchan moved the brand up several notches for me.
– When it is a high-value / lifestyle product or brand, and the right celebrity enhances the aspirational value of the brand. Hmmm… premium liquor? platinum?
– And most obviously, when the ‘celebrity’ is associated with the product category already – this is especially true of social communications – Maneka Gandhi and be-kind-to-animals, for instance. However, the right kind of association, not Salman Khan and be-kind -to-animals – although the association exists and strongly.
However, having said this, I still do not believe having a star / celebrity on an ad is worth all the expense – considering that any celebrity is now available for any brand – for the right price.
What do you think?
I agree!I think celebrity advertising is directly proportional to your credulity than their credibility.As far their worthiness are considered,i would assume,the companies won’t be willing to pay if they didn’t have data to correlate celebrity endorsement with sales.
I’ve strongly maintained that celebrity endorsment is equal to admission of failure on the part of the copywriter/art-director/cd/agency.
I mean, why would you want to ride on the back of somebody to sell the product. Are we so devoid of good ideas? But that’s my own personal viewpoint.
Even if one where to use celebrities, one ought to make the celebrity the slave of the story and the product. (Like coke managed to do with Amir Khan).
One of the best celebrity endorsments I’ve come across is that of Hutch and Dravid, for their cricket dial in service. Pretty neat.
KO. enough drivel.