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The advantages and disadvantages of Celebrity endorsement via social media

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For as long as there was marketing and advertisement, there have been organisations that use celebrities to endorse their product or service. Getting the right celebrity with the right background and with the right character can do wonders for your brand image. Jin and Phua, (2014) defines a celebrity endorser as “any individual who enjoys public recognition and who uses this recognition on behalf of a consumer good by appearing with it in an advertisement”

Friedman and Friedman, (1979) suggested that celebrities are more effective than other types of endorsers. Consumers tend to be generally attracted to celebrities as part of their social self and to the objects associated with them, therefore aligning their interest with those of a celebrity who they look up to and use that to promote a brand can be very persuasive (Dwivedi, McDonald and Johnson, 2014).

Selecting the right celebrity for a brand

Popularity is a large selling point when it comes to companies choosing you to be part of their campaign, therefore if you have a large following on social media, then your reach will also be greater. This is what companies look for, so that their brand, product or service will reach a large and wide audience. Jin and Phua, (2014) gives an example where the most-followed Twitter accounts as of 2013 belong to pop stars, including Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry (each with more than 30 million followers). The more followers one gains on Twitter, the greater perceived social influence one has. This is because tweets are broadcasted to each and every follower, who may then retweet these posts on their own profiles, which are then rebroadcast to thousands of other Twitter members. This would be the same for other social media sites like, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram which especially ideal way of endorsing products, because of the visual aspect of it.

In 2006 alone $2 billion was spent on celebrity advertising in the United States alone and in 2011, Nike spent $2.4 billion on celebrity endorsements. Companies invest in celebrities to improve brand recognition and trustworthiness and to create positive attitudes or distinct personalities for the endorsed brand. An example of this would be those consumers who aspire to be as successful and confident as Roger Federer, who endorses Gillette fusion razors. From this the consumer may engage in tennis and use Gillette razors and become motivated to enhance their own self-image by identifying themselves through that celebrity reference (Dwivedi, McDonald and Johnson, 2014).

Instagram

Instagram has become a huge tool where celebrities can post a picture or a short video of them using or experiencing a product or service provided by a company for them to endorse.

An example would be Gigi Hadid, because she signed a major contract with Maybelline in early 2015 (Wagoner, 2015).

Screen Shot 2016-05-04 at 23.43.02Audience:

  • Facebook: 2,816,711 likes
  • Twitter: 1.96 million followers
  • Instagram: 17.1 million followers

However, celebrity endorsement can be done badly giving off a bad image to the brand for example this sprite endorsement with LeBron James, it is obvious with staged imagery, bad photography and unrelated hashtags, marketing the drink so obviously it almost could be deemed offensive. Celebrity endorsements can be perceived as fake through the overuse of promotional hashtags, product placement and mock enthusiasm.

Screen-Shot-2014-08-07-at-17.13.40

Snapchat

Snapchat even though its new to social network market, it has been making strides in being successful in celebrity endorsements. Companies that want to snag millennial eyeballs turn to Snapchat for obvious reasons, Using the essence of stories to build up a creative story through the use of celebrities. Earlier this year, Snapchat found that 60% to 70% of users stopped watching ads on the app just three seconds in. Coca Cola have been able to turn that around through their snapchat account, being able to tailor its ad content to the messaging app. It’s important that If you’re hiring influencers for your campaigns, give them full control. Don’t censor your influencers; let them create content they know will be resonate with your audience. Cody Johns is a social media star who takes over Coca-Cola’s Snapchat from time to time. In a recent campaign for the beverage brand, he was given the keys to the account to help market their sponsorship of a NASCAR race.

And recently Singer Selena Gomez took over the profile showing backstage footage of her revival tour, all while promoting the Coca Cola brand.

DJ Khaled has recently been asked to endorse a book by Arianna Huffington, called ‘The Sleep Revolution’, its clear to see that this celebrity has been asked to be seen reading this book within his snapchat story, as his fanbase reach is wide and large, and this is a good way to get your book advertised to millions of viewers.  However this somewhat does seem disingenuous as those that view DJ Khaled’s snapchats are aware that he does not show that he enjoys the company of a good book within his snapchat story, therefore this is can be an example of poor product placement. 

DJ Khaled

 

Vine

Viner’s can make a lot of money by endorsements depended on their fan base, Curtis Lepore was one of the first users to get an endorsement, from clients like Virgin Mobile, Aquafina and Jolly Rancher. Lepore told the magazine he can make $1,000 for re-Vining someone’s video, similar to retweets on Twitter, or $8,000 through product placement in a six-second clip of his own (syracuse.com, 2016).

Therefore, the overall benefits of celebrity endorsements are that they help you to tap into new markets by adding a known face automatically attracts new target audience. It also helps to personify your brand; the attributes of the celebrity automatically get transferred to the brand. Finally, it builds trust and credibility for your brand.

There are also some downfalls however, once the celebrities’ popularity decreases so does your brand so you need to make sure that you revive with new celebrities to endorses the products to keep the market growing. Celebrities may also overshadow your brand because they focus more on how big they are and have absolutely no brand recall. Finally, celebrity endorsements are hugely expensive, so keep in mind that you might need to spend millions of your company’s revenue, to keep them on board.

References

Friedman, H.H. and Friedman, L. (1979), “Endorser effectiveness by product type”, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 19, October, pp. 63-71.

Hung, K. (2014). Why Celebrity Sells: A Dual Entertainment Path Model of Brand Endorsement. Journal of Advertising, 43(2), pp.155-166.

Dwivedi, A., McDonald, R. and Johnson, L. (2014). The impact of a celebrity endorser’s credibility on consumer self-brand connection and brand evaluation. J Brand Manag, 21(7-8), pp.559-578.

Seno, D. and Lukas, B. (2007). The equity effect of product endorsement by celebrities. European Journal of Marketing, 41(1/2), pp.121-134.

Jin, S. and Phua, J. (2014). Following Celebrities’ Tweets About Brands: The Impact of Twitter-Based Electronic Word-of-Mouth on Consumers’ Source Credibility Perception, Buying Intention, and Social Identification With Celebrities. Journal of Advertising, 43(2), pp.181-195.

Wagoner, M. (2015). Exclusive! Gigi Hadid Is the New Face of Maybelline. [online] Vogue. Available at: http://www.vogue.com/8088203/gigi-hadid-new-face-of-maybelline-new-york/ [Accessed 4 May 2016].

Fast Company. (2015). How Coca-Cola Cracked Snapchat. [online] Available at: http://www.fastcompany.com/3052407/behind-the-brand/how-coca-cola-cracked-snapchat [Accessed 4 May 2016].

syracuse.com. (2016). Vine celebrities can make $8,000 with a 6-second video, ex-Syracuse singer reveals. [online] Available at: http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2014/05/vine_celebrities_money_ads_curtis_lepore_videos_jessi_smiles.html [Accessed 4 May 2016].

User generated content vs Professionally generated content

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This day and age, social media plays an integral part in different marketing platforms and marketing strategies in general. It has gained more respect than just an area where younger generations can go to pass their time. However, businesses have realised the potential that this could have, by tapping into this as a means to reach out to wider audiences, that are already readily available.

Visuals are more stimulating to the mind than black lines on a white background and the cliché, ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’, is more relevant now then it ever was, using a single picture on Instagram which can say more than a paragraph on a page. The rising age of ephemeral content where Snapchat is taking the social media game by storm, where content can be shared and viewed for only a limited period, has this generation engulfed by it.

However, what is more effective, content that’s made by the user for the user or content that is made by business intended to entice the consumer?

In any case content using the means of a video, which you are trying to portray some sort of message needs to be succinct and presented in a memorable way. Done well, a video can be extraordinarily persuasive.

However, to make good and often effective content which resonates with the consumer can be quite costly, hiring out cameras and cameramen, developing a script on what you want the audience learn and bring this altogether with editing can be time consuming and expensive. Therefore, having those that will use your product or service (the consumer) to produce your content in the eyes of the consumer to the consumer (user-generated content), could be more effective and less costly.

The benefit of this is that for consumers, besides the potential to inform or entertain, the content gives a glimpse into real data from other people, un-touched by regular media outlets (Krumm, J., Davies, N. and Narayanaswami, C., 2008).

Snapchat has really invested in this idea of user generated content, with a new feature called live stories, this essentially is the users posting content of pictures and video of a particular event as it happens, Snapchat are relying on their user base to post onto these stories which others around the globe can view as it happens.

Not only this but once you see a particular moment in these stories you can swipe to see other angles of this moment taken from other users on the social network using an algorithm-based curation, which they call story explorer, this is essentially creating more engagement between their users, creating an integrated network of people contributing to produce a story that can be enjoyed by potentially billions of people.

Once more this is an opportunity for advertising where business can use this to increase their brand awareness to the billions of those that are not there during that event (Wagner, 2015).

In an article by Mashable UK with the help of marketing start-up Crowd tap and the global research company Ipsos they explore how the connected generation get their news. Knoblauch, (2014,) outlined that in actuality millennials (those born between 1980-1995) trust user-generated content (UGC) as much or more than professionally made content, in fact UGC is also 20% more influential when it comes to purchasing and 35% more memorable than other types of media.

They surveyed 839 people aged between 18-36 in 2014, what they found was that within an 18 hour per day media intake, 5 hours was spent on UGC which equalled to 30%, 33% was spent on traditional media (TV, radio, etc) while the remaining 37% was spent on other media. Most of UGC came from social networks at 71% while 60% was content from the TV outlets. Please have a look at this image bellow which would outline more about the advantages of UGC over traditional content.

Millennials-Heart-UGC-Infographic

Image 1: Millennials love UGC

Most consumers, regardless of age, go to the internet to research purchases. And most of them look for user-generated content (UGC) to help them buy. According to the survey, over half (51%) of Americans trust UGC more than other information on a company website (16%) or news articles about the company (14%) when looking for information about a brand, product, or service. (source: Bazaarvoice)

Picture1

Image 2: Top purchases that wont be completed without UGC (source: Bazaarvoice)

However, with all this in mind, it does look very convincing that UGC is much better than professionally made content. A study by comscore a leader in measuring the digital world, and EXPO, the first consumer network focused on creating and distributing high impact product videos found that UGC and professionally made content work better hand in Hand, they both work very well as their own entities however when combined they were more effective than both elements individually (comScore, Inc, 2012).

A quote from comscore on this study:

“It seems that professionally-produced content and user-generated product videos are each successful at delivering different key elements to a consumer through video ‘advertising’,” said Jessica Thorpe, Vice President of Marketing at EXPO. “We found that consumers perceived feature benefits as more believable when coming directly from the brand through professionally-produced content, while the unbiased user-gen videos were more believable in verifying specific product claims, such as superiority and convenience. When used together, all of the perceived gaps get filled in and consumers become more confident in their purchase decision, resulting in better sales effectiveness from the advertising.”

You can find the results and more information, here: comscore.

Therefore, in conclusion those companies that are only producing professionally made content are not harnessing as much as they can without allowing a means for UGC as well, with means such as Snapchat stories, mini viral videos or even interactive videos for more engagement etc.

References

ComScore, Inc, (2012). comScore Study Finds Professionally-Produced Video Content And User-Generated Product Videos Exhibit Strong Synergy in Driving Sales Effectiveness. [online] Available at: http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press-Releases/2012/3/comScore-Study-Finds-Professionally-Produced-Video-Content-And-User-Generated-Product-Videos-Exhibit-Strong-Synergy-in-Driving-Sales-Effectiveness [Accessed 26 Jan. 2016].

Knoblauch, M. (2014). Millennials Trust User-Generated Content 50% More Than Other Media. [online] Mashable. Available at: http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/millennials-user-generated-media/#uWA4UGZB9gqa [Accessed 26 Jan. 2016].

Krumm, J., Davies, N. and Narayanaswami, C., 2008. User-generated content. IEEE Pervasive Computing, (4), pp.10-11.

Wagner, K. (2015). Snapchat Gets Deeper Into Live Events, Wants More User-Generated Content. [online] Re/code. Available at: http://recode.net/2015/11/23/snapchat-gets-deeper-into-live-events-wants-more-user-generated-content/ [Accessed 26 Jan. 2016].