After reading Jared’s post on how athletes, such as those in the NFL, were used for promotional purposes whether it be for charity or for an actual product. https://blogs.ubc.ca/jaredlo91/2010/10/14/breast-cancer-awareness-month/ Clearly such marketing tactics are highly efficient as people look up to these starts, often influencing their buying behaviour if they associate their favourite celebrity with a certain product.
It may appear that celebrity endorsement is a match made in heaven for both the company which hopes for an increase in sales and the chosen celebrity who will more than likely receive a generous pay cheque. However, what happens if it all goes wrong?
In the early 1990s Nike fell foul of some extremely negative and damaging media attention regarding their outsourcing of production to low cost destinations such as Indonesia and Vietnam. There were a number of accusations against them, but the worst and therefore most well known were the terrible working conditions in which workers were exposed to hazardous chemicals which led to a number of medial ailments, long hours, exceptionally low pay of only 19 cent and hour and perhaps most controversial of all the use of child labour.
Undoubtedly this led to strong criticism for Nike, leading to the company’s first loss in 13 years in 1998, not to mention a 69% reduction in earnings. Clearly the moral issues presented were extremely damaging to the company. Yet perhaps most interestingly of all, their marketing campaign was specifically targeted.
Nike established itself as one of the first companies to participate in celebrity endorsements. Famously, it was CEO Phil Knights’ idea to outsource all manufacturing and pour what was saved directly into the companies marketing. This enabled the company to hire the worlds most elite athletes such as Micheal Jordon or Tiger Woods in appear in their campaigns and publically endorse the Nike brand. However, even though at first glance it may appear that Knight had come up with an ingenious idea it actually worked against the company; their famous celebrity endorsements did not help clear the company’s name through positive association, it in fact had the opposite effect.
The famous Doonesbury cartoons targeted Nike on several occasions but the most well known was the shocking revelation that if you doubled the salaries of Nike’s 30,000 employees the annual payroll would almost be equal to what the company paid Micheal Jordan alone. The time and money Nike had poured into their marketing campaign was quite literally turned into a joke, with the response in Doonesbury reading, ‘Nike can’t pay their Vietnamese work force what they pay Micheal Jordon, he would just want more as he’s very competitive!’ Yet this shows that the negative accusations did not only affect Nike, they affected the people advertising their products.
The point Jared raised in his blog, ‘Pro athletes get paid millions of dollars to play the sport so does it really matter what they’re wearing when they do it?’ the short answer is yes. Indeed athletes such as Jordon received high salaries from their sport alone, not to mention additionally large pay cheques from companies such as Nike. For this reason it reflected extremely badly upon him, that he was publicly supporting a company which was being accused of child and essentially slave labour. Famously when asked, Jordon brushed away suggestions that he was personally responsible for conditions in Nike’s factories, leaving responsibility to the company itself. Yet he continued to be pelted with questions about Nike at press conferences intended to celebrate his athletic performance.
In conclusion, even though I believe Jared was correct in arguing that celebrity support can be extremely beneficial for raising awareness, especially with the marketing of certain brands or products, the relationship must be carefully monitored because if any problems were to arise, it is clear that the effects can be extremely damaging for all parties involved.