Sunday, August 15, 2010

One Celebrity, Many Brands... Confusion!


Indian obsessions begin with cricket and film celebrities and end right there. Advertising, most often than not is a victim to this. Take the example of Mahendra Sing Dhoni. Dhoni endorses over 20 brands.These include Pepsi, AirCel, Big Bazaar, Reebok and many more. But how many of us exactly remember each of these brands when we are out for purchase?

For a customer to connect with a celebrity endorsement of a brand, a few aspects would be of prime importance: 

Relevance: Any product that is endorsed, should match the celebrity. A good example of this would be Bipasha Basu endorsing Dabur's Real Activ fruit juices or Kareena Kapoor's endorsement of the 'slim' Sony Vaio laptops.

Diverse Brands: Any celebrity should ideally endorse brands that are diverse from one another. This helps differentiate the brand from the others. This is where Dhoni's endorsements cause confusion and clutter in the consumer's mind, when he fails to recognise Dhoni's presence between one ad and the other.

Brand bigger than Celebrity: This is an aspect brands, celebrities and agencies alike fail to realise. While signing up a celebrity of the stature of Amitabh Bachchan, it is inevitable to land up with the product or brand being secondary to him. Even though this may have been successfully capitalised upon by some brands, and could have led to easy association and hence success of the brand in its initial stages, AB everywhere on television selling too many products caused overexposure and once again, poor brand connect. This is definitely not desired when it comes to quality of the product offering in light of competition.
    Whether Dhoni, the ad agency or the advertiser is responsible for the confusion and clutter would be a point for endless debate,the brand is the one that would lose its sheen.