“Celebrity Endorsement” has become a familiar term in advertising and marketing, it is when a brand, company or a non-profit organization engages a well-known personality with a campaign and uses their social status, fame, persona, and popularity to promote a product, service or a cause.
As a celebrity and celebrity endorsement manager myself, for the past 10 years I have tried to crack the code to the process of choosing or pitching the most effective personality for a brand.
Our company VCM, endeavors as a bridge between celebs and brands, may it be the celebrity pool that we manage or offering our services to connect a brand with the celebrity that is not managed by our team but could be of asset to their campaign. Believe me it is not that easy and there isn’t one magical formula that guarantees success. But there are some steps that are imperative to the process particularly what call brand matching that I would like to share with you.
Brand Matching is the most fundamental step when it comes to choosing the right spokesperson for a brand and it involves various sub-steps of its own.
Define the brand objective in engaging a celebrity:
Is it enhancing brand visibility, increasing sales, educating consumers, launching new products?
Different celebrities have different strengths and characteristic. How they are perceived and followed by demographic varies too. So it is important to know the goals of campaign prior to on boarding a partner.
You have to know the endorsement history of the celebrity:
Knowing how a particular actor for instance, had performed is performing with his/her previous and current brand partners could shed light on their effectivity for your brand.
Identify their interests and values:
This is the key to channeling brand message and humanizing a product or service. Because it is through an endorser’s personality that a brand attempts at reaching out to their target market by creating relatability, aspiration or inspiration.
Study their audience and their engagement
Knowing a celebrity’s personality aside, you also need to know who their audience is and how and why they engage with them and if you share the same demographic for your product. Digitization and access to analytics tools has enhanced our ability to study demographics much seamlessly. So take advantage of these tools to equip yourself with data that is highly beneficial to your brand matching process.
Think long term
Some of the most effective brand endorsements have been where a brand and their endorser have evolved together. This is how a lot of brands have been able to garner the most loyalty from their consumers. Of course with the rise of social media and content marketing many brands opt for short term engagements, and short term digital strategies could be very effective as well depending on campaign objectives, but when choosing a famous celebrity for your brand given the heightened influence and visibility they could bring to the table it is best to think long term.
Having insight in to the world of entertainment and celebrities would be highly advantageous. Our experience with managing celebs has greatly helped us with this aspect. It has enabled us to have an overview of which famous/popular personality mirrors a brand’s personality. It is quite crucial to check compatibility of a brand and a proposed endorser. A study on reputation, fame, communication skills, platforms (traditional and online) and finding common ground between the audience of the celeb and the brand target market is critical. You may not have access to these information but no need to worry as there are companies that could help you with this.
For instance you can engage Vidanes Celebrity Marketing as your consultant ☺
Written by: Naz Nekoudast, General Manager
[April 22, 2020]