Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise. Few would argue with what Ted Turner said. What’s worth arguing about though is what is the best way to advertise. Which brings us to the question of today – is a celebrity endorsement still worth it?
Whose face is it anyway?
Without thinking too hard, on top of your head, is it Kiara Advani, Ranveer Singh, Alia Bhat or Rashmi Mandanna who endorses Duraflex, Sleepwell and/or Wakefit?
If you can stretch the experiment, try to list the most visible fitness endorsers and brands in the market. Done? Great. Who was a better endorser? Why is Farhan Akthar a better brand ambassador for Healthify than, say, Sara Ali Khan? In upskilling or edutech, what makes Dhoni a better fit than Kohli or vice versa?
These aren’t recent campaigns, why would you remember, you ask.
But, isn’t that the point of a celebrity? Weren’t they the glue that held? These are annoying questions, we’ll admit – because question isn’t whether one celebrity is better than the other. The question is whether a celebrity is better than a narrative.
The era of all stars and no audience
Research reveals that people conduct their due diligence on potential dates or spouses by finding them on Tinder, Bumble and the likes or on a Shaadi.com or JeevanSaathi.com, and looking them up on Instagram. Users are aware of these spies and Peeping Toms verifying their profiles on their social media. They don’t seem to mind. If not a partner, they’re happy to win a follower in the bargain. It means a dating app isn’t just where you find love, it’s also where you advertise your social profile.
In the era of the influencer, there is no audience. There is a platform. It works like an old school dance off, where challengers take the stage alternatively to wow other challengers. We like to imagine that brands are centre stage, but they’re just one in the audience, awaiting their turn to challenge and wow other personal social brands.
But personal brands have an advantage over consumer brands. They have a tight narrative, and they strengthen it every day, with every picture of their sunkissed morning look and carefully plated home dinner.
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In a world where everyone is a celebrity of some intensity, the hero is only the narrative. In the absence of one, the narrative of gossipy investor news, thousands of crores in losses, crappy workplace ethics are louder and catchier than whatever narrative getting Messi as a brand ambassador during the Wold Cup can weave.
A bizarre bang or careful celebs
By default, the human brain collates information, processes it and makes decisions real quick by filtering the unnecessary. It blanks out the flora and seeks a snake in the grass. It hears a howl and cancels out the crickets in the night. In a quest for survival, the brain has learned an important, albeit unintelligent life skill. It amplifies things that break pattern – the bizarre, the unusual.
Celebrities were crucial to a brand’s visibility then. Once upon a time, in a sea of the mundane, celebrities stood out and pinned our senses to them. They anchored brands into consumer memory, because of the brain’s very same need to amplify the bizarre.
But there is nothing bizarre about the celebrity anymore. If anything, they’re now mundane.
They are as visible and commonplace as your uncle’s Good morning WhatsApp messages. They’re accessible throughout the day, sharing their deepest thoughts (not too deep), birthday parties, children’s birthday parties, family time, alone time, work outs, date nights, occasional entries into the kitchen and more often than not, highly relatable moments of boredom. They’re Sara Ali Khan’s regular-girl shopping in Bandra and Arjun Kapoor’s penchant for being a tad less dressy at home. Who isn’t? Let’s face it. Celebrities are so much like you and me that they’re on the edge of being just as boring as we are.
Dangerously, they’re so accessible, that we are curious about them- but don’t really like them anymore. We know too much. Presumably why we want to keep trolling them to see what gives.
Remember a time when world news and local disasters were quickly finished in two pages in the paper, so that readers could take a break from reality and see who their favourite hero was photographed with in a party, on Page 3?
We remembered what they wore to it. Masterjis across India were briefed to stitch the same styles. People collected magazines and cut out pictures of stars on holiday. We seemed to not just obsess over them, but to really, really like them. That was easy when you didn’t know how they voted, how they felt about China and Pakistan, how they worked out, what they put in their milkshake, how they did the dishes in Covid, the exact address of their dealer, where they invested their money, who came home to their Christmas party, what their children’s play dates were like where and what their favourite kind of meat was.
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Kapferer in the Luxury Strategy talks about how the key to creating the perception of exclusivity is inaccessibility. The simpleton Brain strikes again. The French Royal Palace valued their prized Aluminium cutlery until someone told them that it was the most common metal on Earth. Salmon is fish for the regulars in Brazil, because of how common it is. What is overpriced and considered an absolute delicacy instead? Dried and salted cod,
Bacalhau. Behaviourally, simply put, the brain values what it believes is scarce.
Accessibility, hence, is the opposite of luxury. Going back to the basics, brands were coveted because they gave you a sense of aspiration, a metric of upgrading and maintaining an upward trajectory in life.
This is also a bane of living in the era of God like technology pacing itself faster than our Palaeolithic brain can evolve to understand it. As technology has become simultaneous with connectivity and being “on” all the time, and as platforms for connectivity have evolved to promote perpetual chatter, celebrities, influencers and brands, alike, believe they have to be relatable.
No, they don’t. Relatability kills exclusivity. Accessibility kills luxury. And in our time, it has killed our interest in the celebrity.
If a brand’s association with celebrities is feeding off their halo, consider what the halo is adding to the brand. Brands are becoming not just more relateable- they’re becoming more mundane, boring.
There’s a reason mainstream cinema is looking Southward. It’s not entirely relatable. The sentiments, gender roles, expressions and styling is an amplification of mainstream bizarre.
It’s also the reason that the biggest influencers on social media are not celebs, but entrepreneurs in the new public domain of social schooling. Since the pandemic days though, their clout is seen dwindling too, leaving only legacy business folk to awe and marvel at. They’re the only crop left who are not accessible. And their occasional public messaging is possibly doing a better job of driving their brands than the celebrities they’re paying for the same.
So where does this leave the marketers and the strategists?
A meta study of 46 studies published until April 2016 with 10,357 participants had, among others, one finding that is relevant for us. “Celebrity endorsements elicit less favorable attitudes when compared to endorsements by quality seals, awards, and endorser brands.”
Let’s face it. Advertising must do two basic jobs. One, is to pop in a consumer’s mind, in situ. The second job is to win an argument against another option in the consumer’s mind. Anything else that advertising may do is a bonus. A bonus cannot and must not be a base expectation. Advertising must sell. Viraling is a bonus. Advertising must help your brand win in a retail argument against another brand. Becoming part of pop culture is a bonus. Designing advertising to create buzzing social conversation is a useless exercise. You’ll end up competing with every teenager, writer, photographer, journo, bot, local, big and small influencer who is doing exactly the same thing every time they violently come to a screeching scroll-halt at a troll-bait post or headline.
Anything that isn’t designed to aid the main role of advertising is a drain on resources and will lead to lower ROI. The onus, therefore, is not on a famous face. Especially when it’s a bit too famous.
Prakash Sharma and Reshma Tonse are the co-founders of 1001 Stories, a user-consumer research and solutions consultancy which uses behavioural science and context architecture to analyse, understand and influence human behaviour. View expressed are personal.