With digital marketing taking the lead, brands are launching profitable social media campaigns with the help of celebrities and influencers. Marketers do acknowledge the power of celebrities in influencing brand awareness and consumer-purchasing decisions.
Though capitalizing on a celebrity’s fame and the fan base is not a new marketing concept, what has changed over time is how brands are using celebrity endorsements. With Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, etc social media channels, brands are targeting influencers with a large audience base to get their brand to the masses.
With a highly competitive market, big brands are at loggerheads when it comes to products and its USP, each product in the market has a similar rival product.
So from where does one gains advantage: advertising, price, service, trust?
Amongst all these, advertising seems to be the best platform where brands prefer to compete. Right from hiring the best advertising agencies for their product to getting the biggest celebrities to endorse them, definitely ensures a feeling of success over the competitor brand.
Celebrity and Brand match!
A general belief among advertisers is that brand communication messages delivered by celebrities and digital influencers generate a higher appeal, attention, and recall than those executed by non-celebrities.
Most brands involve a celebrity in three stages:
- Launch of a product/service
- When they seem to plateau out and
- When they are slipping in terms of awareness or sales.
In all of the above scenarios, the celebrity gives the much-needed momentum to the brand awareness with their target groups. Now whether this translates into sales and justifies the multi-million dollar celebrity pay-cheque is yet another ball game. Thus, the decision to take a celebrity as a brand ambassador clearly depends on the brand strategy, its marketing budget and the overall brand plan post-launch.
The importance of a celebrity-brand match and the various roles played by them as brand-associates show the momentum this strategy has gained in the last decade. The ‘likes’, the ‘tweets’, and the ‘pins’ for a brand that is endorsed by a celebrity are reaching to a great level these days.
In order to give credibility to the brand, it’s important to choose a celebrity who induces positive emotions in your audience, is likable and is able to create buzz.
With increasing content (images, videos, ads, etc), an ever-shortening attention span of consumers is surely becoming a concern for digital marketers. In such cases, a big celebrity name if added to the brand will surely make the brand get noticed.
Celebrities do have a great social media presence and influence that is why digital advertisers and brand managers are leveraging the social media platforms to attract more and more consumers via celebrity brand ambassadors.
Selecting the right Celebrity for a Brand?
Selecting the right celebrity is very crucial for a brand. Though anyone who is famous may be the right fit the perfect match of the celebrity largely depends on the product or service. Most advertisers believe that the need for the brand rather than the fame of the celebrity should be the primary criteria while selecting a brand ambassador. The celebrity’s popularity, physical attractiveness, values, credibility do matter a lot.
The mere presence of a celebrity magnifies the effect of the brand awareness allowing the consumers to equate the celebrity’s personality and the brand together.
It’s true that celebrities have been an essential element for a new product launch and will remain to do so in the near future as well because of their mass appeal and loyal fan following. But, when it comes to a brand, the impact is pretty high than just an advertisement that shows the celebrity.
Have you as brand managers/digital marketers identified your brand ambassadors on social media? If yes, were you able to leverage their presence for your brand? Do share your experiences with us.
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