Celebrity endorsement is when a celebrity use their fame and following to help sell a product or service. Celebrity endorsement is recognised as an effective marketing tool by marketers worldwide, although, it is not a new phenomenon, and is now considered common practice for major firms in supporting band imagery (Erdogan, 2010). Firms invest a lot of time and money into juxtaposing a brand with endorser qualities such as: attractiveness, likability and trustworthiness. It has been suggested by Friedman and Friedman (1979) that using celebrities is more effective than using other types of endorsement. This is because consumers look up to celebrities as role models and therefore brands utilise this influence power to increase sale (Dwivedi, McDonald and Johnson, 2014).

Why you need endorsers

Fashion is important everywhere, it allows a person to express themselves through their style, and can say a lot about a person. Therefore ,choosing the right celebrity to represent a brand is important. Furthermore, a celebrity understands how to promote a brand, as they themselves are a representation of their own brand.

The public admires celebrities; as a result, they have a large fan base and following. In today’s culture, social media is an influential platform for brands to advertise, as most people follow their favorite celebrities on social media. Therefore, combining celebrities and advertisements go hand in hand, increasing the promotion and brand successfully.

Recent research conducted by Till et al, has found that celebrity endorsement leads to a favourable attitude towards the brand being endorsed. No wonder one in four advertisements use celebrity endorsement to engage with their consumers; since using celebrity endorsement influences advertising effectiveness, brand recognition, and purchasing behaviour. (Spry, Pappu, Cornwell, 2011).

See link to more information on the power of celebrity endorsements

Advantages of using a celebrity endorsement:

Influence consumer purchases:

Many people have the attitude, ”if the product is good enough for her, it’s good enough for me”, for example, purchasing the same hair curlers Therefore, the consumer purchases the brand the celebrity endorses because they want to have the same effect that the product gives and in some way ‘connect ‘ with the celebrity.

Build awareness:

Celebrity’s build brand awareness through advertisement, this can be achieved much faster than other forms of advertisement. Celebrities have a strong following, in particular on social media, therefore, their campaigns can reach a wider audience faster.

Help people remember ads:

It has been found by McCraken (1989) that celebrity endorsers can build brand equity by acting as secondary associates, therefore, creating better recall for both the endorsed brand and the advertisement. Consequently, influencing the consumer when purchasing a product (Atkins & Block, 1983).

Risks

Images change

Celebrity images can change over time, for better or for worse this public image can affect the brands which they endorse. For example Tiger Woods .

Tiger Woods had sponsorship agreements with several brands at the prime of his career. However, in 2009, some infidelities came to light, crumbling his public image instantly. His actions resulted in a number of his sponsors including: Tag Heuer, Gillette and Gatorade, dropped Tiger Woods from their campaigns instantly. Others, such as Nike, kept him on for longer, however, they also dropped him after sales fell for the products he endorsed.

See link with more information on how Tiger Woods’ infidelities could cost shareholders up to $12 Billion

Celebrities can over shadow brands

Celebrities can over shadow their brands when consumers focus on the celebrity rather than the product itself. This may occur when celebrities endorse multiple products at once. For example: David Beckham endorses many products where he features heavily in print. However, he can devalue a product when consumer’s member David Beckham over the brand.

Example of an effective brand ambassador

Kendall Jenner has become the brand ambassador for Este Lauder She appears in print, TV and digital advertising as well as “playing an active role in creating social media context that will reply on Estee Lauder’s channels as well as her own”. Therefore, create further brand awareness for their products through Kendall’s social media following; she currently has 79.4 million Instagram followers to advertise to.

Estee Lauder has struggled to appeal to a younger audience in recent years. Therefore, Kendall has been chosen to appeal to a younger target audience, which is the predominant age range of her followers.

Link to more information about Kendall Jenner as a brand ambassador for Estee Lauder. 

How to measure effectiveness:

Here are 5 different ways which a brand can measure the effectives of their brand ambassador campaign:

• Brand reach

How many people has the brand ambassador reached with relevant content?

• Traffic to brand site

How many people have been attracted to the brands site through codes to monitor effectiveness of campaign?

• Revenue generated

How much has revenue increased since the ambassador campaign?

• Campaign related activity

How many posts on social media contain the campaign hashtag?

• Engagement through campaign related content

How many likes, posts, shares and comments has the campaign received, and how many users have engaged with content.

Strengths

• Increase brand awareness
• larger reach
• Builds trust and credibility

Weaknesses

• Images change
• Celebrities become overexposed
• Celebrities can overshadow brands

References:

Atkin, C. and Block, M. (1983), “Effectiveness of celebrity endorsers”, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 23 No. 1, pp. 57-61.

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.

Erdogan, Z. (2010). Celebrity Endorsement: A Literature Review: Journal of Marketing Management: Vol 15, No 4. [online] Tandfonline.com. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1362/026725799784870379 [Accessed 26 Apr. 2017].

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

McCracken, G. (1989), “Who is the celebrity endorser? Cultural foundations of the endorsement process”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 310-21.

Petriccione, A. (2017). The Power of Celebrity Endorsements. [online] Adobe Slate. Available at: https://spark.adobe.com/page/TWwgi/ [Accessed 26 Apr. 2017].

Spry, A., Pappu, R. and Cornwell, B. (2011). Celebrity endorsement, brand credibility and brand equity: European Journal of Marketing: Vol 45, No 6. [online] Emeraldinsight.com. Available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/03090561111119958 [Accessed 26 Apr. 2017].

Brand awareness refers to whether customers can recognise a brand, influencing whether a consumer purchases a product (Keller, 2008). If a customer knows about a brand, they are more likely to consider in the consumer purchasing decision process (Baldauf and Cravens, 2003). To increase brand awareness, it is important to engage with consumers, Snapchat has become a popular way for brands to do this.

Snapchat currently has over 100million active users, with 400 million snaps per day (Dredge, 2013). This makes Snapchat one of the fastest growing social networks. Snapchat has claimed to be the best social media platform to reach 13-34 year olds (Carter, 2016) therefore a popular way to engage with a younger target audience. It allows for a person, or brand to send photos and video’s to their friends and followers. These can last for a maximum of 10 seconds per clip, before they disappear. Snapchat has a range of colourful filters, face swapping effects, and messaging functions; making it a fun and interesting app (Benner, 2016).

Functions for brand promotion

Product launches:

Snapchat can help promote live events, with many brands using Snapchat to promote new product launches. In particular, the fashion industry has taken advantage of this, streaming behind the scenes at fashion events, catwalk shows, and offering snippets of new collections before being launched. For example, Burberry allowed snapchat followers a sneak view of their fall collection before London fashion week.

See link to Vogue, for more information on Burberry’s Snapchat.

Promotional codes:

One way which brands keep their followers interested and watching their content, is by offering promotional or discount codes to followers who watch a full story on Snapchat. For example, ASOS regularly offer flash discount codes for via their Snapchat story. The down-fall of this, is that codes are not unique to individual followers, therefore users can screen shot promotional codes and send to their friends. In turn, this means that ASOS would not have accurate analytical data to identify how many of their followers used the promotional code.

See link attached for more information on ASOS using Snapchat to promote discount codes.

Brand awareness:

Snapchat has recently introduced a function which allows a brand to advertise ‘snap ads’. This is a 10 second, vertical advert that appears between users’ stories. Snapchat then allows for a user to swipe upwards to access more in-depth contents about the product. Brand awareness is key to online sales, as Lewis’ AIDA model (Attention, interest, desire, action) suggests, a potential customer needs to be aware of a brand and their products in order to consider purchasing (Hasssan, 2015).

See link for more ways to increase brand awareness.

Add a filter:

Geo-filters have become a highly effective way to increase new business. This allows users to press and hold on their face, and a filter appears. Moving your face usually triggers’ the filter to change and do something out of the ordinary, for example ‘spitting a rainbow’. Once finished, users can send the image or video to their friends.

Example of a branded snapchat filter

Superbowl Sunday:

America’s Super bowl Sunday is now not only known and watched for the NFL final game, but also for the adverts. Gatorade created a Snapchat filter, which allowed users to ‘dump’ a virtual cooler, filled with Gatorade over the head of themselves, like NFL players would traditionally do to their coaches. This allowed fans to join in with the excitement of the game. As a result, the filter had 160 million impressions; more than the 111.9 million who watched the game. Increasing Gatorade’s brand awareness (Digiday, 2017).

The downfall of snapchat:

Unfortunately unlike other social media platforms, it is difficult to extract analytical data from Snapchat as it doesn’t have functionality to like, share or re-tweet posts therefore. However there are some analytical methods to track effectiveness such as:

Unique views:

These are the number of people who have viewed a post. This can show how popular a post is by the number of users opening and viewing what a brand has posted.

Screen shots:

One way to track consumer engagement is through screenshots, screenshots are most helpful when measuring the success of a promotional code as many users will screenshot the code for reference. Brands are then able to track how many users used the code in comparison to the number of followers who viewed the promotional post. Therefore, tracking the effectiveness of the campaign.

Completion/ fall off rate:

Most brands promote on Snapchat through their stories. To drive brand engagement it is important that users view all the stories posted. The number of users who watch a story is presented on Snapchat, therefore it can be seen the number of users who watched the first story versus the last story and see what the completion rate was in comparison to the drop off rate.As Snapchat continues to grow it is expected that their analytical tools will become more sophisticated and follow in the footsteps of other social media platform’s which have been established longer, such as instagram and facebook.

Invasiveness:

A further disadvantage of using adverts on Snapchat is that they may become invasive to users. Snapchat has recently introduced paid adverts, which interrupt a users viewing of friends stories on Snapchat. This goes beyond the ads on the ‘discover’ section of Snapchat, which gives users the opportunity to view adverts and scroll up for more information, even being able to forward articles to friends. These discover adverts are optional to the user, whereas the adverts between stories are skip-able, but intrusive.

Although Facebook and Instagram users are familiar with adverts, they are able to scroll past, without heavily impact on their user experience. Whereas the Snapchat adverts flash before the user, having to proactively close the advert themselves. Therefore becoming intrusive and distracting. These adverts can be skipped after 1 second; therefore brands may not see a high ROI for the adverts used on Snapchat users can close them instantly.

Strengths

• Fun filters for increased user engagement
• Show users live footage
• Market promotional codes
• Increase brand awareness

Weaknesses

• Few measureable analytics
• May be intrusive to users
• More users skip the adverts than view them

References:

Baldauf, Artur, Karen S. Cravens, and Gudrun Binder. “Performance Consequences Of Brand Equity Management: Evidence From Organizations In The Value Chain”. Journal of Product & Brand Management 12.4 (2003): 220-236. Web.

Benner, K. (2016). How Snapchat Is Shaping Social Media. The New York Times. [online] Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/technology/how-snapchat-works.html?_r=0 [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017].

Carter, T. (2016). How Snapchat is building the future of social media. [online] Marketing Land. Available at: http://marketingland.com/snapchat-building-future-social-media-heres-181479 [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017].

Digiday. (2017). Gatorade’s Super Bowl Snapchat filter got 160 million impressions – Digiday. [online] Available at: http://digiday.com/marketing/inside-gatorades-digital-ad-playbook-snapchat-facebook/ [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].

Digital Marketing Institute. (2017). Will Digital Make Or Break ASOS?. [online] Available at: https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/analysing-asos-digital-strategy [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017].

Dredge, S. (2013). Ten things you need to know about Snapchat. The Guardian.

Hassan, S. (2015). Strategic Use of Social Media for Small Business Based on the AIDA Model. Procedia, social and behavioral sciences, 172, pp.262-269.

Huang, R. and Sarigöllü, E. (2012). How brand awareness relates to market outcome, brand equity, and the marketing mix. Journal of Business Research, 65(1), pp.92-99.

Pike, N. (2015). Burberry On Snapchat. Vogue. [online] Available at: http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/burberry-streams-show-on-snapchat [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017].

To many social media novices, the hashtag may seem meaningless with many people using random hashtags at the end of Instagram captions. However, once fully understood, they can be a powerful tool to help increase brand awareness on social media.

A hashtag is a ♯ symbol, which many people include in their social media activity (Heyd and Puschmann, 2016). The word or phrase which is hashtagged then goes into a pot of hashtags which others, who aren’t following the account can view the content. The hashtag is so well recognized that it was added to the oxford dictionary in 2010. However, different social media platforms vary in the way they use hashtags, for example, Instagram uses hashtags to describe the photo, whereas twitter hashtags are focused more on a topic of conversation to engage with the user (Ma et al, 2012).

Chris Messina, a former Google designer, first introduced Hashtags to Twitter in 2007, but now most social media sites use them (Paige, 2012). There is much debate as to how many times you should hashtag in one post. It has been suggested by Bourgeois, 2015 that for twitter a maximum of 2 hashtags is appropriate, whereas on Instagram the more hashtags the better, with the highest interactions on Instagram having more than 11 hashtags.

The hashtag is used to connect and engage with other social media users. There is a community built around a common theme (Yang et al, 2012). For example, if you search for ♯HauteCouture then 2,539,208 posts dedicated to haute couture appear under that hashtag (Instagram, 2017).

Why they’re important for the fashion industry?

If a profile is in the public domain, then using hashtags will draw more attention to the account. It allows anyone to view the image, broadening the amount of social media users the post will reach; whereas previously, content would be limited to followers (Giannaoulakis and Tsapatsoulis, 2016). Therefore hashtags can be an important form of advertising for smaller retail businesses such as ‘In The Style UK, who have built marketing campaigns solely through the use of social media and Instagram, using brand advocates to promote the products.

How to track effectiveness

When creating a social media strategy, it is important to understand the effectiveness of the campaign. Whether the purpose if to increase traffic, increase product awareness or customer interaction, you need to measure success. Adding relevant hashtags to an Instagram post enables you to connect specific posts to campaigns and then measure their effectiveness.

Campaign that went well…

Expedia

The first example of a business that used hash tagging on Instagram successfully to create a trend of their own is Expedia. Expedia, a travel company, used a spin off of the already popular “♯throwbackthursday” or ‘♯tbt” to create their own marketing campaign. Expedia encouraged users to tag their nostalgic ♯tbt posts with the hashtag “♯ThrowMeBack” . In return, Expedia would offer 10 winners the chance to revisit the place they had tagged and recreate the photo. A winner was chosen each week for 10 weeks.

The results of the campaign were:

Impressions – 5 million

Engagement – 300,000

Instagram growth over 10 week period – 96%

Calvin Klein

Calvin Klein is another example of how a brand can use hashtagging successfully. Calvin Klein created a marketing campaign for their new underwear line, which encouraged users to post photos of them wearing their Calvin Klein underwear baring their company logo and hashtagging ♯MyCalvins. The majority of users who posted photos with this hashtag were young and attractive. This campaign was therefore of strategic importance to Calvin Klein who recognized the type of person to post a photo on social media in their underwear was likely to be young and attractive. This shows how Calvin Klein understand their market and their online activity. They understood that an unpaid post by a friend was likely to be more powerful in promoting the brand than a paid celebrity endorsement.

The results of the campaign were:

Interactions – 23million

Number of new Instagram followers – 1.8 million

Global reach – 469 million

Campaign that didn’t go so well…

Susan Boyle

In 2012, Susan Boyle’s PR agency has a disaster when they used to hashtag ♯susanabumparty to promote her latest album. This hash tag should have read “susan-album-party”, instead many misinterpreted the hashtag as sus-anal-bum-party. The hashtag was later rearranged to read ♯SusanBoyleAlbumParty to prevent any further misunderstanding. Although embarrassing for Susan Boyle, she did go viral with the hashtag, which she may not have been the case without the misinterpretation. Susan Boyle was lucky that many found the misinterpretation funny, other companies have had disastrous hashtags which can be offensive to users or have been misunderstood.

Lessons learnt

• Hashtags can have a negative impact on companies if they are not researched and checked for appropriateness
• Should be a call to action for consumers to increase consumer engagement
• Make sure hashtags can’t be accidently made into a new hashtag with words other than those intended.
• Always check others aren’t already using the hashtag before tweeting about it.

References:

Bourgeois, A. and Bourgeois, A. (2017). How Effective Are Hashtags on Social Media? [INFOGRAPHIC]. [online] WeRSM – We are Social Media. Available at: http://wersm.com/how-effective-are-hashtags-on-social-media-infographic/ [Accessed 27 Feb. 2017].

Giannoulakis, S. and Tsapatsoulis, N. (2016). Defining and Identifying Stophashtags in Instagram. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 529.

Heyd, T. and Puschmann, C. (2016). Hashtagging and functional shift: Adaptation and appropriation of the #. Journal of Pragmatics.

Instagram.com. (2017). #hautecouture • Instagram photos and videos. [online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/hautecouture/ [Accessed 27 Feb. 2017].

Ma, Z., Su, A. and Cong, G. (2012). Will This #Hashtag Be Popular Tomorrow?. School of Computer Engineering.

Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags. Discourse & Communication, 6(2), pp.181-201.

Waldrum, H. (2012). #Susanalbumparty: Top five Twitter hashtag PR disasters. The Guardian. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2012/nov/22/twitter-susan-boyle-susanalbumparty [Accessed 27 Feb. 2017].

Yang, L., Sun, T., Zhang, M. and Mei, Q. (2012). We Know What @You #Tag: Does the Dual Role Affect Hashtag Adoption?. School of Information, the University of Michigan.

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