The Bollywood drugs case has thrown a plethora of perception challenges at the Indian marketing industry’s use of celebrity endorsements to push products and services to the Indian market.Immediately after the Sushant Singh Rajput murder investigations led authorities to investigate the possibility of a drug angle which in turn opened up a pandora’s box for the Bollywood industry.As names of popular entertainment industry participants and some even stalwarts kept tumbling out it led to a deadly silence in the industry and led to a rise in general public expressing their resistance to the movie exhibition industry and their boycott.The investigation is on-going and only at the starting point.I am as a marketing and communications professional looking at the impact of such events on the practise of celebrity endorsements for marketing.I am primarily relying on secondary sources of data and research to highlight the evidence of impact if any on celebrity endorsements.Let me start this with a caveat that this the world of business and it works using all forms of inputs both moral and immoral ,legal and not so legal but the the prime yard stick is fiduciary discipline and rules.
I must admit at the outset that when I started out in my career in Shilpi Advertising ( A Sarabhai Group company) I was working on Decom marketing the marketing arm of the Sarabhai FMCG company Swastik Household Products and Surfactants , at one time one of the largest detergent and soaps manufacturer and marketers.It was planning a relaunch after a very long interval of inactivity.(Its demise is another story).Market Research was undertaken ascertain the consumers brand perceptions and brand communications memories.Remember this is circa 1987.Despite the decade long hiatus consumers expressed their willingness to associate with the family of brands- Det (powder detergent), Swastik Shikakai, and Det bar.The market research showed that consumers were keen to buy the brands after such a long interval and had positive brand association and the link of their association recall was a celebrity .Swastik Shikakai a bar soap for body and hair .It as a solid shampoo in today’s language and such a product form already existed in India. The celebrity,Sobha De and the distinct yellow packaging figured very high in their recall scores.People remembered the celebrity endorsers very clearly.
The second endorsement event related to my tenure as Marketing and Communications manager at Bridgestone ACC where we decided to launch the Donut’s range of radial tyres using Md.Azharuddin who was the serving Indian Cricket captain for the World Cup Tournament. We felt since cricket is a such big spectator sports with a huge following in India we could counter our competitor MRF ‘s use of Sachin Tendulkar .Though we signed him for a multi year contract for the Bridgestone Donuts Brand the betting scandal and his admission in the Hanse Cronje issue pushed us to avoid being dragged into negative publicity by abrogating the contract for future periods.Despite this event I feel he was a perfect fit and a right choice for our brand.One needs to understand that Bridgestone’s production was more than half the Indian industry’s passenger car tyre demand.We were able to to in four years reach 100 per cent capacity utilisation and increase the radialzation of the the Indian passenger car market.We have in our events used celebrities like Ajay Jadeja during Auto Expos
and Alisha Chinoy and Rageshwari Lamba at our factory dedication ceremonies.Such celebrity usage pumps up the motive force of internal audiences like business partners,client management, media, employees,dealers and expo visitors.On ground activities sync very well with advertising campaigns and press coverage and dealer promotions.It enables the marketing network to grow in newer markets thus pushing the brands reach in new territories.
I shall follow up with another blog in continuation on this subject.