On Madison Avenue there’s a catch phrase:
“If you have nothing to say, get a celebrity to say it.” Using star power to sell a product isn’t new. In the 1880s humorist Mark Twain hawked tobacco in newspapers, and the face of actress Lily Langtry appeared on soap wrappers. In the mid-1950s a young Ronald Reagan appeared in cigarette ads decades before tobacco became synonymous with the phrase class action lawsuit. Perhaps our great-grandparents believed that Mark and Lily really used these products, or that cigarettes were good for us because a movie star endorsed them, but is the modern marketplace so trusting? Icons like Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart tumble, losing their megabuck endorsement deals along with their reputations. A pop star signs a deal with Pepsi and is photographed gulping a Coke. Run a search on Google and you can find celebrity endorsements for sale to the highest bidder. Name your price. Choose your face.
According to an Adweek survey, 20 percent of all commercials feature a celebrity pitchman and 10 percent of all advertising dollars are spent on celebrity endorsements. Advertisers are willing to spend the bucks for a simple reason: it still works. “Fame can create instant product recognition,” says Dr. Donald Hantula, associate professor of psychology at Temple University. “By tying a product strongly to a celebrity, a company can quickly achieve a level of recognition that it might otherwise spend years and millions trying to develop.”
Despite the glitz surrounding it, the popularity of celebrity marketing is actually based on small-town mentality. Lynda Goldman, a business image and etiquette consultant with Goldman Smythe & Associates and author of How to Make a Million Dollar First Impression, says, “One of the big points in sales is recognizability. We feel comfortable if we think people are like us, so when we meet strangers we immediately begin to look for points of similarity. Did they go to the same college? Do they like the same places for vacation? If we can’t find points of similarity, we become suspicious and uneasy.”
In the past, people were likely to live in small towns or close neighborhoods and thus did actually know the local tradespeople. “It’s not like we’re friends with the pharmacist on the corner anymore,” says Goldman. “In a big, transient city we often have no relationship whatsoever with the people we’re doing business with.” So how do marketers quickly create the illusion of recognizability? They hire celebrities to sell the product. [ The complete article is 4347 words long.]
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