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Synopsis

Celebrity Endorsement has often been used by marketers to boost their products' brand image. The rationale behind its immense popularity is assumed to be classical conditioning, whereby a celebrity transfers his qualities to the product thereby enhancing its image.
Celebrities have also been in demand having succeeded in being effective by rising above the clutter & grabbing the attention and focus of the consumer. They also succeed in creating an aspiration in the minds of the consumer to acquire what their favorite celebrity endorses.

However, the above might be too simplistic a solution for multitudes of marketing problems in the real world. Hence to analyse how effective any Celebrity Endorsement campaign is, we need to look at the various factors which impact its success. Through this paper, we have developed an analytical structure called "Impact-Analysis Framework" comprising three main factors - Brand, Consumer, Endorser and the interaction between Brand - Endorser and Consumer-Endorser. Other than these primary factors we have found another set of influencers which amplify or shrink the effect of a campaign.

Further, we apply our framework to a series of celebrity campaigns to gauge the reasons for the success and failures of each to check the validity of our model. In our analysis, we also came across factors which have impacted campaigns in very specific terms and hence cannot be generalized; to elucidate the same, we have presented analysis of some of these unique cases which have been marked by diverse outcomes.

Introduction

Aristotle (Ohanian 1991) said, "Beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction." This could aptly summarize why innumerable products are endorsed by celebrities, with or without a significant need or benefit from the same.

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* Contributed by: -
Ankur Khera & Rahul Chowdhury,
PGPM - Batch 2004,
Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon.