Anupam Tewari is a brand and advertising strategy consultant who has held senior executive-level positions on blue-chip brand portfolios.
On any given day, one would be hard-pressed to avoid encountering some news of a brand or two launching celebrity-based advertising campaigns. Its regularity makes it feel like a usurpation, an upending of the tried-and-tested craft of brand-building, which means showcasing and allowing product truths to speak for themselves, telling great consumer stories, entertaining and captivating us.
The path to purchase and brand loyalty is truly a journey. Brand-building is part and parcel – indeed, a necessary step – in facilitating the journey. But overreliance on celebrity advertising has the potential to dislodge this natural process. Between awareness and purchase (let alone loyalty and advocacy) come other intermediate steps, even if the consumer journey appears to be noticeably meandering these days, given the multiplicity of channels and environments.
But the surge in celebrity usage is a giveaway that the brand is trying to take a shortcut. Good for the brand metric reports – a boost to quarterly sales and comfort in the CMO's chair and the boardroom, maybe, but not necessarily healthy for the more natural, longer, mental journey that can only happen in the consumer's mind.
Because in consumer minds, other shifts need to happen – shifts that are better guarantors of longer-term customer-brand relationships. Shifts such as consideration (the balancing and trade-offs in brand and product benefits, the comparisons in competitor brand choices) and persuasion (feeling the allure and giving in to brand traits).
When a brand chooses to use a proxy, a celebrity, instead, it can have the effect of displacing that natural journey in the mind, the organic progression of shifts. The stark glow of the celebrity can be a distraction. It may well take away the limelight from the brand, its own aura and tantalizing traits. The focus can become more the celebrity, less the brand.
The risk of overusing celebrities is in lessening the sheen and dulling the lustre of the brand on its own merits. Also, significantly, a brand that overrelies on celebrity-powered campaigns may find it challenging to address the core brand barriers it desires to overcome with its target audience.
That's not to say that the use of celebrities isn't justified, per se. Some brands need the helping hand, the celebrity association to help create and shape brand image – to hone brand perception, to articulate and project brand personality, character and values. To build by association.
Even established brands can benefit from a celebrity association that accentuates brand character traits. But an overreliance on such association belies the brand's innate strength, its inner confidence. What we increasingly see, though, is that big brands are choosing to employ these campaigns, going for the quick payoff.
Samsung professes to have awareness as its objective in its use of celebrity advertising. When such a brand – almost universally known, familiar, liked and trusted by consumers – chooses to spend its sizeable budget on celebrity advertising to introduce a new product that would in all inevitability be considered dated in a few months, it suggests expediency. Not so much magnetic brand or product truth here – or appealing consumer insight either.
Under Armour has been building its brand identity on the shoulders of sports celebrities and other famous figures. These celebrities are not cast in a light of being endorsers of a brand campaign – they are the brand campaign.
It is a company that takes pride in its innovation, vision, core beliefs and mottos, and thinks of itself as a performance company – all ingredients for a strong brand. Yet, as consumers, we are left adulating celebrity icons and their stories in the brand's campaigns.
While the ads have been emotionally powerful, one wonders about what the brand stands for, beyond admirably espousing, self-effacingly, the inspiring stories of its celebrity endorsers.
Because celebrities are human beings, with frailties and missteps, things can go awry. When they do, the news becomes embarrassingly public and quickly so, in these times of social media. We've seen major brands hurry to distance themselves from celebrity endorsers who have faltered.
Such brands might be better off investing diligently in the methodical work of brand-building, instead of lingering in the shadows of star power.
While we do live in a celebrity-soaked culture, clients and agencies that believe in more than mere reflection of culture might reap benefits by stewarding their brands into something deeper. They would find illuminating brand stories in their products, their origins and in the lives of consumers.