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Inertia is a potent force and consumers have that in plenty. Brand managers employ celebrities in the age-old AIDA model to counter that. The Celebrities draw Attention, generate Interest, evoke Desire and induce Action from the audience. Our safe assumption till now has been that there is perfect congruency between the brand, the celebrity and the target segment. Let's drop this for a while, to land on the practical ground and look into real-time decisions. An old Japanese proverb goes that "Vision without action is a daydream but action without vision is a nightmare."

Managements across the world need to realize that no matter how great the ad-spend and famous the celebrity, they cannot succeed if the core product offering fails to meet the consumer expectations. Every endorsed brand may garner some start-up euphoria and blind-spot sales, but to sustain its meteoric rise, it cannot afford product dissatisfaction. In such cases, the celebrities are also quick to dissociate themselves from the brand, as it hampers their carefully cultivated image of an infallible character.

Again, not every celebrity works for every product. Each personality carries a set of perceptions attached to it and these have to be in sync with the perception the brand has or wishes to generate. Mercedes Benz would never hire a Govinda in India or Michael Jordan elsewhere, but these same men have simply worked wonders for respective brands like Navratan Tail and Nike. A clean, natural fit between the celebrities and the brand image enhances the latter's value. Lux is a glowing example of being the 'beauty soap of film stars' since the last fifty years! A well-managed celebrity endorsement has the ability to convey to the customers that the celebrity is benefiting from the brand, and they will too.

Many endorsements fail because they use the celebrities like a prop in the advertisement copy. There should be an idea which makes the celebrity relevant, firstly to the product and finally to the consumer. The bottom line is that the celebrity endorsements work truly only when the commercial is provoking and original. Aamir Khan's successful incarnations in the 'Thanda Matlab' copies for Coca-Cola have added a new dimension to this assertion. It projected the brand as the star, being cherished by the celebrity and not the other way round.

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* Contributed by: -
Rahul Dhanuka,
Class of 2006,
Indian Institute of Management, Indore.