What would you think at first glance if you see an advertisement of a random person, promoting a famous product? Consider the product is your one of the favourite or you are looking for it for quite a long time. Then what will you do? Will you be interested/little interested/not interested at all?
My personal choice would be to go for that product. Because I know my thoughts, in this case, will be- “this guy/girl is like me, he/she has got the advantage of using that product. Hopefully I’ll get the same benefits if I use that product too.” To be honest, I know there are many people like me now who like to depend on a non- celebrity than a celebrity. Because Trust is a big issue!
After the boom of social media usage, people like us have become famous by social media advertising. An example- before 2013, Joanna Soh was just a normal girl. Today she is a public figure with 553,676 subscribers in her YouTube page and have 94,188 likes in her Facebook page. She is a certified fitness specialist and nutrition coach. Her videos are mostly related to fitness and food. Today she is inspiring thousands of people by her work and she also promotes renowned brands like Puma, Nescafe mountain wash coffee etc. After watching her recent video, I definitely have considered to buy the Puma shoes instead of buying rebook!!
When the situation comes to promote a product by any normal people, the company should consider the most important fact that- “the people help to connect with the mass audience”. The more people will use that product, there will be more business- altogether simple equation. After all, every company wants the best business.
Marketing Management Blog 
Celebrities are popular and followed by many people so it makes sense that there is a strong allure for marketers to enlist one to pitch their product. A celebrity can capture consumers’ attention for your brand, link it with their own personal brand and associate their positive attributes with those of your product.
On the other hand celebrities can go terribly off script and take the brand with them. Plus there are other potential downsides, such as the additional cost of hiring a celebrity, which will impact your budget. And when watching ads, consumers may focus more on the celebrity and less on your brand. And ultimately, the approach may not work. One 2010 study found that the majority of celebrity ads were no more effective than non-celebrity ones.
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The support story stands true, but in my opinion, I think that Joanna Soh was promoting a service (giving tips for health and how to exercise) thus in relation to her videos, the promotion of the Puma Shoes might have taken off. But in general, if i see a random guy promoting, say, toothpaste (pretending to be a doctor) I’ll probably think that he might be faking it and I might not trust the product. So I guess, the way an ordinary person is portrayed for the selling of a product is the main trick behind the sale of the product and not the ordinary person.
Thanks
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Hiring a celebrity to pitch up the sales has not always proved to be a successful branding strategy. Many researches has criticized the effectiveness of this approach. A study in 2010 by ace matrix shown that, hiring celebrities to promote sales added not a big advantage to the sales, instead at certain instances celebrity add performed below the industry average.
Nevertheless, branding with celebrity is associated with high cost which could be used in making a creative ads which has been proved more effective then the former. Another subjective issue is the personality transfer of the celebrity to brands image and reputation. There are various examples where brand suffers due to the celebrity’s involvement in unethical behaviors. Selection of right star is also an important factor in the success of the ad.
I remember those PEPSI ads which constantly used the famous Pakistani cricketer SHAHID AFRIDI in their advertisements which never inspired me because of the continuous downfall in his performance,
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Group 56
It may be that a person associates with a normal person rather than a celebraty, a normal person may make the association real, rather than a distant celebrity.
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Interesting post. I did a little bit of research on this one and found an interesting paper (ref below). Consider the following two citations from Parmer (2015, p. 133): “Home cleaning and snack food are the two product categories we found in which non-celebrity endorsement is more effective.” Also, “Commercials that do not use famous celebrities have been enjoying considerable success of using non-celebrity.”
This paper concurs with the findings that some product endorsement can be just as successful, using either celebrity and non-celebrity people. Furthermore, the benefit of not having celebrity endorsement are:
(real people meaning non-celebrity )
• These are real people like us, who make a personal connection with the general population.
• If they have a negative event in their life, the media generally won’t care, hence further protecting the brand image.
• It gives real people like us more opportunity to find our livelihoods in the advertising field these days.
• With the advance of social media, non-celebrities are becoming celebrities. Thus social media can provide the mechanism for this to happen.
• I have no doubt that the use of a non-celebrity is less costly to a firm than using a celebrity.
So in summary, the non-celebrity can have the same impact on brand advertising as the celebrity under certain situations. The firm needs to assess when this is an appropriate means to endorsing the product and utilise this option.
Parmar , B. K. J. 2015, ‘Fame versus no name: Gauging the impact of celebrities and non-celebrities endorsement on purchase’, african journal of business management Vol 9 ( 4), pp. 127-133.
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Thanks for the paper, derjblog123 🙂 I was looking for something like this…
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In my opinion it can work both ways. Relating to a normal person might be a tad easier but getting inspired by that common person is difficult in most cases. Today a Dwayne Johnson giving you fitness tips gets you more people to look at the advertisement rather than Poorna Chandra ( An Indian bodybuilder). There is a possibility that people will relate to a common person but getting inspired is what is done by a popular public figure, mainly due to the traditional practices.
All big brands, like Nike, Adidas, Levis etc are slowly shifting towards having normal people in their ads. At the moment there is a blend of celebrities along with normal people.
I would sum it up by saying that the trend is changing but not has not changed completely yet!
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I researched that the top non-celebrity brand on Facebook with over 89 million likes, Coca-Cola (Coca-Cola). They use a variety of engagement tactics within their predominately short form posts, from tagging some of their more active fans in their posts to get their attention, to asking questions and prompting users to answer them using a specific hashtags. They are big fans of the traditional promotion/contest approach (“like my page to enter our sweepstakes”), which aligns back to the general nature of CPG as a whole and supports their large follower counts.
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Like your blog….i think your right people do relate to the ‘average’ person these days, whatever that may be. But does Joanna get paid to tell us about products or is that just a by product of what message she is actually trying get out (health and fitness).
Whatever the the angle may be, from the video it would seem that she is doing it for the greater good, which means people can trust her….
Nice choice
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I agree with this to an extend. If a brand has developed itself to a level where the product is more important, it is better to use a non-celebrity to convince the consumer market. On the other hand, if it were a fresh brand, using a celebrity would increase the recognition of that brand. While using a celebrity, the characteristics attached to the personality would be extended to the brand image too. A study from 2009(source below) showed that the employment of a celebrity attached to a brand had greater success than an ordinary person.
Source
Click to access Celebrity-Endorsements.pdf
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Celebrity endorsements I believe can go many ways. The intent is to try and transfer positive associations from the celebrity to the brand. However, this doesn’t always go to plan and there have been some celebrity endorsement horror stories outline in the following link (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-13-worst-celebrity-endorsement-fails-2012-1#kirstie-alley-jenny-craig-2008-9).
Personally, whether there is a celebrity tied to a particular product will not influence my decision to purchase the goods. If there is a professional or someone directly involved with the industry talking about the product (for example, 4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident), I think this is more impactful. Instead I will utilise all the information now available on the web, whether it be reviews from the industry, reviews from every day people, asking for opinions via social media and comparison websites etc.
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Nice blog i perfectly agree with you. for me also its about the product and its features not about the guy or the girl who is branding a product is he or she a famous person that does not matter. in fact company is spending less on marketing and earning more profit here are some example for the same that company branding without celebrity.ZooZoos are white creatures with ballooned bodies and egg heads who are used to promote various value added services of Vodafone. Although these characters look animated, they are actually humans in Zoozoo costumes. The ads were created by Ogilvy & Mather, the agency handling Vodafone advertisements.
when Vodafone use to advertisement of Zoo Zoo it was famous and people were just crazy about the advertisement but the people working behind the scene were common people.
the artist those who are playing that Zoo Zoo roles are common people.The ads were a hit among the Indian audience. This can be gauged from the huge fan following on social networking sites such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter.[6] There are more than 200 pages on ZooZoos having over 250000 fans, growing daily
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In my leisure time I would like go to YouTube find some interesting video. Such as cooking, makeup, and fitness. As we know, everyone can upload video into the You tube and if someone like you video can give you likes. You can found some video makes very professional and it has many people following their channel. Also the most popular you tube people would has reward form you tube. Some people make has chance cooperation with the company. The video will showing the product how to use in you daily makeup. Following the technological develop, people can creating the video by themselves and their might only use the camera, computer. Non-celebrity branding would be become more and more popular in the internet. Because of the people are close to normal people’s life and it is easy to create the same feeling in the same thing.
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