Celebrity Marketing
Assignment Objective
Describe how Celebrities can be used as a reference group for different types of consumers. When does it make sense for marketers to use celebrities in their marketing strategies? Use ads to demonstrate how celebrities have been effectively used.
Celebrity Endorser: What and Why?
Credibility is the basic source of the endorser and it is created by transfer of meaning to the audience. Some companies in the world want to create instant popularity for their product; for this purposes, celebrity is one of the short cut (Mc Cracken 1989, p. 313). Celebrity can be defined as “an individual who is known to the public (actor, sports figure, entertainer, etc.) for his or her achievements in areas other than that of the product class endorsed” (Kamins cited Friedman and Friedman 1979, p. 34). From this terminology, we can see that a celebrity does not have to be an actress or an actor, but they may come from various fields of activities, even in the year 2000 IBM did a celebrity benchmarking using the Q-Score for one of their products (Deep Blue computer) which released in 1997 (www.ibm.com). Acquiring high a Q-Score after three years of its hit when the computer fight with Garry Kasparov in a chess tournament, shows that a celebrity status is very important to create consumers’ recall or familiarity with a product. In IBM’s case, the Deep Blue popularity became leverage for IBM superiority among Information Technology industries.
Besides becoming a source of credibility, another reason the company uses the celebrity because it creates persuasiveness among the consumers (Mc Cracken 1989, p. 311). Furthermore, Mc Cracken defined this as a celebrity endorser process, which means that “any individual who enjoys public ...