Getting a celebrity on board can send sales northwards
The last few years have seen a really quite remarkable fall from grace for many of our sporting and cultural heroes. Celebrities including Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods and now sadly Oscar Pistorius have been in the press for all the wrong reasons. For characters who once burnt so brightly in our public conscientious, the tarnishing of their legacy must be incredibly humiliating if not damn right traumatic.
By Ben Dyer, CEO of ecommerce software specialist, SellerDeck
For the numerous brands associated with these fallen idols, the damage can be devastating. Starting with Lance Armstrong, during the weeks after he was stripped of his Tour De France titles, his sponsors moved to distance themselves almost immediately.
Nike, a long standing personal sponsor since 1996, was one of the first companies to drop him. This was followed by Oakley, Giro helmets, Anheuser-Busch and many others. The rationale is simple; by making a bold public statement the companies involved hoped to distance themselves as quickly as possible.
This sounds like a good idea, but no one told the internet!
With an almost infinite amount of storage available to us the internet has become an incredible archive. This archive, as Nike discovered this week, can come back to haunt you. I’m sure at the time the team behind the Oscar Pistorius’ “I am the bullet in the gun” ad thought it was very clever.
Unfortunately for Nike, that ad is being run by most news agencies as the sad news from South Africa is being distributed.
What can we learn?
So what lessons can organisations that use celebrity endorsement take from these examples?
Brand value is made up of two core elements: credibility and trust. The fundamental method of growing these two metrics is by promising something tangible (innovation, performance, reliability, etc) and actually delivering it. The most powerful brands do this very well.
For example, BMW and ‘quality’ are synonymous as are Apple and ‘innovation’. Nike and its slogan of “Just Do It” lends itself very nicely to the idea of the hero, the overcoming of adversity with success. Therefore, when the hero turns out to be the villain the damage is massive. Not only are the brand’s core values threatened but it’s a direct contradiction, this damages both credibility and trust.
We all have two sides, a personal reality and a public persona. The public side is in effect a social veneer which can be manipulated to match the way we want to be portrayed. Basic psychology dictates that the closer these two are, the more genuine a person is; genuine people are probably a better bet for the marketing folks.
In the case of Armstrong, the personal reality and the public persona were so out of sync there was always going to be trouble. However, personal and celebrity endorsements can be successful. A great example is David Beckham. In many people’s eyes he can do no wrong, after all this is a man that goes by the moniker of Golden Balls; he delivers the goods and has done for years.
The truth is simple; by including fallible, complex and unpredictable humans in a brand strategy we should expect the occasional problem. Brand strategies revolving around personal endorsements will continue to be made long into the future, because fundamentally it works.
Do the pros outweigh the cons, probably, but in reality it’s the judgement call on an individual. The challenge for brands is to find characters that accurately match their own goals and values, and that means doing your research.
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