If you are famous, you can sell my product!

Celebrity endorsements are the order of the day. A 10 minute TV viewing session would reveal that brands rely heavily on celebrities to make them sell or at least be known to the target audience. A few brands do this well. There are others that get celebrity endorsements and do not know why they need to do so. In many instances, it is just because they do not know what else to do. 

There are various objectives why a brand would go in for celebrity endorsement:

• To make the brand stand out in the clutter of other communication leading to greater awareness
• To help the brand sell by highlighting a product attribute close to the celebrity being chosen
• To establish a certain value that is common to the celebrity and the brand to develop stronger brand connect with the target audience

There are various ways in which a brand can use a celebrity:

• As the celebrity himself having used the product, asking audiences to use the product
• As the celebrity himself, drawing a parallel to his life to establish the need of the product but not endorsing the use of the product
• As a character in the communication and not the celebrity himself/herself; either endorsing the use of the product or not

It is but logical to have a famous celebrity endorse your brand. The same logic goes for a toss when there is a famous celebrity endorsing hundreds of brands. Viewers will not be able to distinguish brand A from brand B. Not just that, where many celebrities endorse various brands in the same category where the category itself does not have much differentiation among brands, it adds to further confusion. Let’s take a quick test. Match the following innerwear brands with their brand endorsers.

Endorser	Brand
Salman Khan	Macroman
Hrithik Roshan	Onn
Sunny Deol	Amul
Shah Rukh Khan	Dixcy Scott
Saif Ali Khan	Sirtex
Ajay Devgn	Lux
Akshay Kumar	Dollar
Neil Nitin Mukesh	Oscar
Emraan Hashmi	GenX

For sure, you would not be able to complete this test without a Google search. The question is, what does Akshay Kumar possess as an attribute that a particular innerwear brand would see fitting its values and why can’t Saif Ali Khan not do the same? The answer would elude everyone.

The challenge of establishing the connect with the consumers is further pronounced when the category has a player who enjoys a near monopoly. For instance, the paint industry. Asian Paints is a behemoth and the brand uses celebrities only for the premium range, Royale. Nerolac is another player in the category and nowhere close to the leader. Shah Rukh Khan endorses Nerolac but most people would mistake him as an endorser of Asian Paints. That’s because the recall of the leader is so strong!

Another mistake that brands do is to keep hopping from one ambassador to other. This is more surprising when the subsequent ambassadors have nothing in common to each other. A case in point is Micromax. They had Akshay Kumar as their brand ambassador a few years ago. The strategy was simple. Akshay doesn’t endorse many brands and they used his comic timing to make the TV commercials entertaining, thus hoping to make them memorable for the audience. To a large extent, they were successful. Off late, Micromax has been using Hugh Jackman, the renowned Hollywood actor, as their brand ambassador. There is nothing in common to the 2 actors. The question is, why such distinct personalities. The brand, when it had Akshay as the brand ambassador, wanted to connect with the masses and they did become a household name. With Hugh Jackman, the brand wanted to appeal to the affluent segment with its new high end phones. That is the reason why they went with a Hollywood personality. The strategy has not been very successful because they are fighting well established players in that price bracket and it will take a lot of effort on Micromax’s part to move from its ‘low price’ image to a ‘high end’ image.

Shah Rukh Khan is the Badshah of Hollywood and the king of endorsements. He has at any given point in time more than 10 endorsement deals. On one end, he endorses Hyundai cars, the brand for the mass market, and on the other, Tag Heuer, the luxury watch brand. Viewers and consumers of communication from the brands he endorses would definitely not be able to recall all the brands.

Credibility of claims made by the endorser also matters. If the brand endorser appears in a communication as the consumer himself/herself, the brand must ensure that the credibility of the claim is maintained. Often, what the endorser claims is very difficult to believe. A case in point being Big Basket. Their endorser is Shah Rukh Khan and in their communication, SRK is seen to be ordering from Big Basket. Either the brand thinks that the consumer is naïve and would buy into this or they have just used an interesting plot to popularise the brand. If it is the latter, it would be a strategy that the brand has taken up and only time will tell the success of the endorser. However, if it is the former, the brand really does not understand its audience.

One aspect that the brand going for brand endorsers needs to keep in mind is the amount of media spends it is willing to undertake. While the endorser’s fee may be a few crores, the brand needs to spend multiples of that to ensure that the endorsement is known to target audiences. Sachin Tendulkar is the brand ambassador of a less known life insurance brand called Aviva. Very few Indians are aware of the brand itself. So the brand has 2 tasks – make Aviva a known brand and make Sachin’s association known to target audiences. With very little media budgets, neither is getting done. Hence, the company uses Sachin mostly for existing customer meets and distributor engagement.

Brands that buy a lot of media have realised that given their media weights, they don’t necessarily need a brand endorser. There was a time when Pepsi and Coca Cola would heavily use brand endorsers to drive their communication. Today, it is a fine mix of celebrity and non-celebrity communication. These brands use celebrities to highlight a specific value that they want to drive through the celebrity. For instance, Pepsi used Virat Kohli to highlight its focus on the young and ambitious India. Similarly, Thums Up consistently uses action heroes to highlight the value of high energy and boldness. Coca Cola has recently used Alia Bhatt in their communication in the capacity of a character that she plays in the family oriented approach, something that the brand has been following for a few years now. Coca Cola has used film actors as characters within their communication, hence, they are not necessary endorsers.

It is important for a brand to be sure of why they want to have a brand endorser. Best use of brand endorsers are those in which the brand values are reflected in the brand endorsers. Brands must also look at the strategic impact of the endorsement on the brand rather than just trying to gain awareness and a share of mind of consumers. It is the overall impact of the endorsement that matters and not just piece meal results.

The alignment of values is also what Aniruddha Bapu recommends to his disciples and followers. It is only when the values of an individual are aligned to what God really wants as values in his children, does life become beautiful. It is this alignment that makes one’s life meaningful and worthy of spending years on earth.