CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENT

Application: Brand Positioning, Marketing Communication, Value Creation

The Concept

Fame is a very powerful tool open to modern marketers. Actors, musicians, singers, politicians, and even criminals are admired and followed for their public recognition as much as for a particular skill or achievement. Some are even famous for little more than continual appearance in the media; famous for being famous. Alongside favourite TV shows and magazines, these celebrities become a familiar part of day-to-day life. They are intriguing, beguiling, and incredibly valuable as a result. (In 2002, for example, Jennifer Anniston is reported to have earned £21 million, see Pringle, H., 2004.) People feel a sense of warmth toward them and follow their own package of celebrity, magazine, style, and soap opera.

In fact, for many, fame is a route to success and achievement which they think is not open to them through any other means (hence the success of Simon Cowell and shows like “X Factor” or “America’s Got Talent”). Others follow celebrities and celebrity trends very closely as a guide to their own tastes and lifestyles. Aspiration is an important aspect of the fame and celebrity phenomenon. People mimic their favourite film stars or sports heroes because they want to be associated with the success represented by their lifestyles. This is often subliminal, but nevertheless very powerful. A young woman styling her hair like Jennifer Aniston or teenage boys dressing like British soccer star David Beckham are all associating with perceived success, and buy associated merchandise as a result. It may not be that everyone is consciously aping the lifestyle of celebrities but they become familiar with issues, values, and products or services through media they find fascinating. As a result, this phenomenon is a powerful marketing tool.

Despite the virtual silence in marketing text books or many academic tomes, there is no doubt that marketers in many different industries use celebrity endorsement extensively. They try to use a celebrity close to the personality of their brand or brand aspiration. In luxury goods, fashion, and cosmetics, for example, names like Jennifer Lopez, Thierry Henry, Victoria Beckham, and Tiger Woods have been used to create aspiration. Even in groceries and more routine purchases the likes of chef Jamie Oliver and footballer Gary Lineker have been used.

The Lineker campaign for Walkers crisps is one of the longest running modern UK celebrity campaigns (and has also been used in other countries). The main thought behind it is that “these crisps are so good they can make a nice guy nasty”. In choosing the celebrity to play the part the agency sought out the nicest man in football. Gary Lineker; a player who had never even received a yellow card. Using Lineker as the nice person so tempted by the Walkers crisps that he turns nasty and steals them from a young child was a brilliant piece of casting against type and that basic idea has underpinned of the campaign ever since.

There is also a celebrity dynamic in business-to-business markets. Famous business leaders (like Jack Welch, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson), famous media (like the Harvard Business Review), famous events (like Davos), and famous companies (like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs) attract audiences amongst business leaders willing to learn. They are prime marketing tools. The leader of a modestly sized business who wants a big four firm as their accountant, the director who stands on an awards platform with a well known academic guru, and the chief executive who basks in the glory of the latest acquisition led by one of the big merchant banks, are all reflecting this phenomenon to a certain extent.

A pre-eminent example of the use of celebrity in business-to-business marketing is Accenture’s recent use of Tiger Woods. His focus and achievement became the emblem of their alignment with business aspiration through their “high performance” positioning campaign. The campaign matched his drive, expertise, and success with the message that Accenture employed people with similar attitudes who could help business people achieve similar success (and, of course, many of their target market played golf). Accenture’s experience also shows, though, some of the dangers of celebrity endorsement. When Mr Woods had marriage difficulties and his public image was tarnished by behaviour that was not received well in the media, Accenture had an agonizing decision as to whether to continue to use him and eventually ended his contract.

The line in the sand seems to be whether or not the celebrity has done something illegal, in which case it is very hard for companies nowadays to retain the relationship. In most cases the furore caused by a celebrity inadvertently using or wearing the wrong brand merely adds more oxygen to the publicity and actually adds value. Kate Moss was not convicted of the illegal use of class A drugs, so while she was dropped by fashion retailer H&M (because it seems Stefan Persson, their Executive Chairman, was closely involved with Mentor, an anti-drugs charity), all her other contractual relationships were renewed. Indeed Moss gained an important new client: Philip Green and Topshop. So, her increased notoriety may have made her more bankable as it reinforced her “edginess” (one of the reasons why she has been a successful model for so long).

There is a hard financial dynamic to this technique. For instance, after Princess Diana was photographed in 1995 carrying the “Lady Dior” handbag, they sold 100,000 at $1,000 each, raising the company’s 1996 revenues by 20% (Thomas, D., 2007). Hamish Pringle reports (Pringle, H., 2004) that the celebrity campaign with Gary Lineker made the market share of Walker’s crisps rise by 6% and produced a return of £1.70 for every £1 spent; while Sainsbury’s tie-up with Jamie Oliver added incremental revenue of a staggering £1.12 billion and a return of £27.25 for every pound spent. (As this data comes from Britain’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, it is likely to be reliable.) The financial success of celebrity endorsement and the use of fame is so remarkable that it is a disgrace that marketing academics have not substantiated and codified many of the techniques behind it more extensively.

History, Context, Criticism, and Development

As Tom Payne points out (Payne T., 2009), both fame and celebrity have been phenomena of human society for a very long time. He makes associations with, for example, the attitude of the ancient Greeks to the antics of their gods and draws common principles from similarities with modern celebrity culture. Celebrity has, for example, been used pitilessly by ambitious business leaders and marketers for some time. In the 1700s Josiah Wedgwood exploited links with royalty and nobility. After the Queen commissioned a tea service, for instance, he styled himself “potter to the Queen”. He also decided that there was a market for cameo portraits of famous people or “illustrious moderns” as he called them. His pottery produced a series of medallions of famous people of the time (Charles Wesley, The King, William Pitt, and members of the aristocracy) and these pieces are still admired today. They were a sort of collectable set of celebrity portraits before Hello or Heat magazine. As Professor Nancy Koehn said: “Josiah understood the value of celebrity sanction. He worked hard to obtain it, absorbing significant costs in time and money in order to produce highly specialized individual commissions. While other potters avoided such orders, Wedgwood actively sought them. Once he had completed an aristocratic sale, Josiah lost no time in advertising it to a much larger, more profitable market” (Koehn, N. F., 2001).

In the 1800s Lillie Langtry (an A-list celebrity actress, novelist, and mistress to the King of England) amassed a small fortune from her association with Pear’s soap. In 1881 she was paid £132 (a princely sum at the time) for her first Pears advertisement in which she said: “Since using Pears’ soap for the hands and complexion I have discarded all others” (despite not using the product). Considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world, crowds greeted her all over the USA during her first tour of that country and she took a furnished apartment in exchange for endorsing American Recamier preparations. It is said that she helped to make advertising socially acceptable. In the 1890s Adelina Patti earned the nickname “Testimonial Patti” for the extent of her endorsements (corsets, pianos, toothpaste, olive oil and, of course, Pears soap!). Even the adventurer Scott of the Antarctic took Heinz on his expedition in 1911.

At the end of the 20th century, though, marketers and others seemed to become more aware of this phenomenon and began to develop organizational expertise (such as dedicated agencies and selection processes inside large organizations). In 1988, for instance, Armani hired society editor Wanda McDaniel to get Hollywood players to wear their range. The first impact of this was with producers and executives through informal contacts. Armani took on the dressing of Jodie Foster for awards after she was criticized in the 1989 Oscars (where she won for The Accused). Then followed Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Tandy, Steve Martin, Dennis Hopper, etc. Their success could not be disguised: between 1990 and 1993 Armani turnover doubled to $442 million. So, from the mid 1990s onward, fashion houses began to routinely dress stars in return for them attending fashion shows and post show parties. With the rise of brand Beckham and the success of god-maker Simon Cowell, the modern celebrity machinery was born. This growing marketing phenomenon, and the organizational competence it requires, particularly in the digital age, needs to be more extensively studied and codified.

Voices and Further Reading

• Pringle, H., Celebrity Sells, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2004. (The first “how to” book on the use of celebrity with brands).
• “Marketers and their agencies should be aware that the general public is cynical about the motivations of stars in doing testimonials for brands – they think these celebrities do it for the money, and of course they’re right. So the skill is to do everything possible to counteract this cynicism and create a context in which the relationship between the brand and the star has genuine credibility. One of the ways in which this credibility is undermined is if the brand enters into a relationship with a star who already has too many other contractual links with other brands.” Pringle, ibid.
• Payne, T., Fame: From the Bronze Age to Britney. Vintage Books, 2009.
• “It’s possible to see our fascination with even the most fleeting stars as something that bonds us, and which expresses something about how our civilisation works.” Payne, ibid.
• “The goal is to show that celebrity is accessible. Readers feel that they ‘know’ celebrities in a way that they will never know models. There’s glamour but not distant glamour. Celebrities are in TV, movies and pop music. They are in people’s lives and in people’s living rooms. They are not mysterious.” Martha Nelson, founding editor of In Style (quoted in Thomas, D., 2007).
• “No other malice goes faster than fame; growing with movement, strengthening as it goes, first little, fearful, soon striding the winds, it treads the earth … the horrid huge monster has many wings, beneath which … are vigilant eyes.” Virgil’s Aeneid.
• “Harry Winston’s advertising budget in the US is slightly over $1 M … but if you ask nine out of ten people in this country … they’ll say: ‘oh yea, they are the jeweller that dresses the stars’. Dressing celebrities is an overwhelming way to gain awareness. Uma Thurman put Prada on the map. … Americans spend billions of dollars on luxury brands because celebrities do.” Carol Brodie, Publicist for Harry Winston diamonds (quoted in Thomas, D., 2007).
• “The bottom line is that celebrities sell much better.” Anna Wintour, Editor-in-chief of Vogue (quoted in Thomas, D., 2007).
• Sweitzer, M., “Uplifting Makeup: Actresses’ testimonials and the cosmetics Industry, 1910–1918”. Paper to the business history conference, 2004.

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