Role of source in ads and celebrities as source in Indian ads
Celebrity branding, also known as celebrity endorsement, is a type of advertising campaign or marketing strategy that involves well-known people using their social status or fame to help promote a product, service, or even raise awareness on environmental or social issues. It is used by brands, companies, or non-profit organisations. Marketers use celebrities as brand ambassadors in the belief that the celebrities’ favourable perceptions of the brand would spread to the goods or celebrity-associated brands.
Celebrity endorsement is typically used by fashion or beauty brands, but non-profit organisations also rely on celebrities because they have effective mass communication skills that can grab the public’s attention and help them reach a wider audience while also raising awareness of a particular cause or issue.
Infomercials are a kind of advertising that is often created and funded by a business looking to market its goods and services. Once infomercials reach their intended audience, they generally have a very positive and convincing impact. The majority of celebrities nowadays are eager to promote a product for which they are paid well. Businesses invest a lot of money on associating their brands with attributes like charm, amiability, and reliability.
But why would one recommend something they haven’t even used? Customers first feel a particular sense of satisfaction when their favourite celebrities support a product. Some people would just choose to purchase a product or use a service that has a celebrity endorsing it. For these reasons, the majority of businesses today think and assume that a well-known celebrity endorsing their products would boost sales.
Numerous companies of all sizes and kinds utilise celebrity endorsements as a marketing tactic. While some detractors claim they don’t have much of an influence on business sales, others contend that there are several advantages to adopting them.
Here are a few reasons why using celebrity endorsement as a marketing tactic for your goods or services makes sense.
It increases a company’s reputation
By selecting and supporting the proper celebrities for their goods, businesses gain increased reputation. Celebrities specialise in a variety of fields, including music, cinema, fitness, fashion, sports, etc. As a result, as a company, you should take advantage of this and engage a celebrity whose expertise aligns with the product or service you want to promote. An author or fitness trainer, for instance, will be effective in endorsing a health and fitness-related item or service.
So take notice that if the correct celebrity promotes your goods, buyers will take your company and product more seriously.
It possesses strong corporate brand recognition.
Celebrities excel at networking without a doubt, and they also have simple access to a large network. These are people that like taking photos, which are often posted on blogs, social media, publications, etc. Therefore, utilising a well-known celebrity will dramatically increase your brand’s visibility in your target market and outside.
In this sense, using a celebrity to promote your goods might be wonderful since it will offer them the most exposure possible. Fitness enthusiasts will be interested in learning more about the waist trainer and the brand, for instance, if you build and sell a waist trainer and a celebrity is seen working out with one. Before you know it, potential consumers will be contacting you through phone calls, tweets, and text messages to ask questions about the product and how to get it. In the end, this corresponds to both higher brand recognition and more revenue.
Fantastic marketing tool
Last but not least, celebrity endorsements often boost a company’s PR significantly since they rapidly draw the interest of paparazzi and the media at large. Getting a celebrity to speak about your product is the best marketing strategy a company can do. When a famous person does this, your product will get loads of media coverage and public interest. Without them, your business runs the danger of being unnoticed and missing out on very lucrative transactions.
Influence of celebrity endorsement on marketing
An alternative to inventive advertisements is a celebrity endorsement. While creative advertisements are more likely to use humour or logic, celebrity endorsements tend to focus on the celebrity’s strengths and more often than not, they force the celebrity to address the public directly by asking, “I use this brand, do you,” or, to put it another way, “I am using this brand, so should you.”
However, the marketer must also consider the endorser’s reputation and should prefer to stick with a celebrity whose image is consistent rather than one whose image changes often. Celebrities with solid and difficult-to-change public perceptions include Michael Jordan, Sachin Tendulkar, and Michael Schumacher. They are thus one of the most preferred endorsers for eminent organisations.
Celebrity sphere
Celebrities’ ability to reach a broad audience of potential customers makes celebrity branding and celebrity endorsement of a company’s product particularly successful.
The number of individuals who have at least once seen or heard the brand’s intended message is known as reach (Belch & Belch, 2012). If a brand or business chooses to employ celebrity branding to sell its product, it is extremely likely that it is doing so in an effort to reach the broadest range of prospective customers feasible rather than a smaller number of customers more often, or what is known as frequency (Belch & Belch, 2012).
The data from telegraph.co.uk on the top Instagram celebrities may be used as an example of the value of a celebrity’s reach. Cristiano Ronaldo is the Instagram star who is most followed, with all or most of his 192 million followers seeing each of his posts. With 164 million followers, Selena Gomez is in second place, and Ariana Grande is third with 116 million.
If one of these celebrities posted a photo of themselves using the business’s product and encouraged their followers to buy it—and this is just on Instagram—that would constitute a direct brand endorsement. Think about the impact if a famous person posted an endorsement on all of their social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.). An A-list celebrity’s reach has the potential to connect with millions of prospective customers, which makes it a very efficient technique to increase sales or, at the very least, spread awareness of a company to a larger audience.
Advantages
- Celebrity endorsements can build brand equity. An example of this is Nike, prior to Michael Jordan Nike mostly sponsored tennis and track athletes and decided to expand their market, which increased sales to become a multibillion-dollar company.
- Celebrity endorsement is used as an advertising strategy, by using celebrity status and image, to promote a brand’s recognition, recall, and differentiation.
- It helps customers to remember advertisements when seeing a celebrity that has already got a brand of their own, it will bring customers to try or purchase the product.
- It also helps the brand to stand out over a brand that does not use celebrity branding.
- Increased attention to the product and the brand
- Polishing the image of the brand
- Introduction of the brand to new and wider market
- Repositioning of the brand
- Guarantee of successful advertising of the brand
