After reading Shayla Hardy’s blog “Using Celebrities in Ads is Not fulfilling Expected Return”, I do not completely agree with Shayla’s opinion that celebrity endorsement is not effective as an marketing strategy.
In her blog, Shayla mentioned that nowadays, celebrity endorsement is a pricy option and is limited in terms of adding value to the product and ultimately winning over the consumer. From my point of view, it really depends on the type of product that we are talking about. In some industries, celebrity endorsement play a huge role in their marketing as the performance of these celebrities directly affects purchase intentions and actual sale of their products. Take sports products for example; the reason why Nike and Adidas are so dominant in the market is because they have most of the world’s top athletes promoting their products. Derrick Rose was named NBA’s Most Valuable Player and as a result, his signature shoe caught the world’s attention. For people who are passionate for basketball, Rose’s performance will definitely have a psychographic affect on their purchase intentions. For me, although I am not a huge fan of Rose himself, I definitely had the incentive to buy his shoes as I imagine myself playing like him on court after putting on his shoe. （Which is unfortunately unrealistic ）. My purchase intention that was raised by Rose’s performance will further stimulate me to do research on the product. Finally, the characteristics of this product such as price, quality and special feature is what will finally influence my decision on whether to buy it or not.
However, it is true that for some products, celebrity endorsement may have a reverse affect as the more commercials, magazines, bus ads consumers see, the more phony they seem. Just as Shayla mentioned, what are the chances of a celebrity using an $8.00 drugstore product. I think that whether celebrity endorsement would be successful as a marketing strategy really depends on the nature of the product and its industry.
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