Under Armour Conspiracy and Celebrity Endorsements

Under Armour Conspiracy and Celebrity Endorsements

While celebrity endorsements have been around for a long time and some might consider it to be the second oldest profession, technology has enabled innovative companies to use them in clever ways. In some cases companies can even pick up endorsements “unintentionally”, and the smart agile companies know how to capitalize on this. (Under Armour conspiracy and celebrity endorsements)

Here’s what we mean:

The Windfall

Recently Keira Fogg of Winnipeg, Canada began receiving so many orders for her crystal bouquets that she thought for sure that her website had been hacked.  Turns out that A-List celebrity Cameron Diaz had given the company, Little Box of Rocks, a much needed boon by Diaz including this company in her celebrity style guide after seeing the product in Goop Gift Guide.  Fogg, who just began her company on October 1 of this year has been so inundated with orders that she is enlisting the help of friends and family to fulfill them.

While you might be able to pray for this kind of windfall, the odds of this happening are probably pretty low.  If you want a celebrity to endorse your product, you are probably going to have to go out there and pursue it.

One way that you can MAKE this happen is to place your product in the hands of celebrities such as athletes and then, if they actually like the product, they may be kind enough to give you a shout-out on social media, which you can then jump on and promote like crazy on your own product’s social media outlets. This is one way of creating buzz for your product that simply cannot be bought.  This is a bit of a dicey proposition, however, and you definitely have to be in the right place at the right time and have some sort of access to these high profile individuals and your product must also be something that they might actually use and benefit from.

The Under Armour Conspiracy

Under Armour is a company that is familiar with the in’s and out’s of celebrity endorsements.  The brand did $2.3-billion in sports clothing in 2014 and has been known to pay tens of millions of dollars for celebrities to get behind their product such as the $30 million dollar deal that Under Armour made with basketball great, Kevin Durant.  An investment that has paid off in spades.

The moral of this story is that although you may not be able to invest tens of millions to get the celebrity endorsement of your dreams, allocating a portion of your marketing budget to securing a high profile endorsement can pay off in terms of return on investment, brand recognition and getting your product or service better known in the right public sector.  As the endorsement with Kevin Durant demonstrates, this type of celebrity athlete is in perfect alignment with the brand and the audience they are trying to captivate.

The Odd Duck

One recent trend in celebrity endorsements is to use Bollywood figures to boost a brand, or some other quirky type celebrity.  These celebrities tend to be less mainstream, but still tuned into the pop culture movement.  By using these types of celebrities and having a humorous, surprising or even shocking element to your commercial or ad, conversation amongst the general public about your product or service is generated.

Examples of this are Nawazuddin Siddiqui, a Bollywood actor and his endorsement of such products such as Truecaller, a service that identifies numbers that have called your number globally, and Mayur Suiting, a premium manufacturer of premium quality fabrics known on an international basis and favored by celebrities and the wealthy.

The moral of this story is that while it is important to secure the right celebrity that fits the demographics of your public, sometimes it is worth thinking outside of the proverbial box and creating an advertising campaign that is quirky and gets people talking about your brand.  One word of caution on using this technique, just as people get tired of hearing the same song on the radio, this method is great for immediate impact, hype and talk but be sure not to beat a dead horse.  Have your next brilliant idea in the wings and employ it just before the first one becomes a notorious ear worm.

The Local Celebrity

It may be somewhat surprising that you have celebrities in your own hometown, but think about it.  Even in the backwoods of Jackson Hole, Wyoming celebrities are practically crawling.  How can you identify celebrities in your area?  Easy, google.com.  Even if you live in backwoods Iowa, there is a whole list of well-known personalities that hail from the corn state, such as Laura Flynn Boyle, Aston Kutcher, Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, Cloris Leachman and Shawn Johnson, just to name a few.

Shawn Johnson did a commercial for Girl Scouts on KWWL Channel 7 in Waterloo, Iowa and another for a grocery store known in the midwest, Hy-Vee.  So it’s not as unrealistic as you might expect.  And further, it is probably not as expensive as you might expect.  A Tampa Bay Buccaneer NFL Football Player can be booked as a speaker for somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000.  While that may sound like a significant sum of money, it needs to be evaluated in terms of potential return on investment.

Of course there are a myriad of ways that a business can utilize a celebrity endorsement.  Good use of imagination and creating an impact, not just with the celebrity you choose for your endorsement, but also for your campaign could mean the difference between stagnant sales and exponential sales growth.

What to do next:

Finding the right celebrity and getting though the layers of people between a celebrity and your company can be challenging.  Let CelebrityCred.com take the guesswork and the unknowns out of the equation by helping you get the right celebrity at the right price for your company’s next killer advertising campaign.  Call us at 1(888)359-4521 or visit CelebrityCred.com to find out more.

What do you think? Let us know.