Celebrities have great influence in the lives of common people. That is the main reason why brands rope in celebrities for their brand endorsements.
Brand ambassadors, such as Ranveer Singh & Alia Bhatt (MakeMyTrip), Aamir Khan (Snapdeal), Amitabh Bachchan (FirstCry, JustDial), Shah Rukh Khan (YepMe, BigBasket) are the new faces to attract audience to online.
There is no doubt that they surely would be successful attracting a flock of people, but would this beable to build a brand?
Celebrity Endorsements as Strategy
Celebrities, specially from the field of cricket and film industry have always enjoyed a demigod status in the society. They add glamour to a campaign and people could easily connect with them as they make the brand and its product look more desirable.
Do Online Businesses Need Celebrities?
Situations in televisions and print media are different from e-commerce sites. Market researchers still debate on the fact whether celebrities have same hold in the minds of people. Reason being, e-commerce marketing is still growing and not yet a well established marketing as consumers still doubt on quality and money issues. Also Social platforms like Twitter and Instagram have brought celebrities much closer to commoners which has decreased their demigod status a bit.
The Traffic
The market is increasing day by day and so are the brands. The first choice of each brand may clutter and also as number of needs are increasing maybe things can get neutralized after few years.
Attention magnets
In e-commerce Celebrities are just an attention magnet.
For example :
Snapdeal was a close third to Flipkart and Amazon years before. The main problem that Snapdeal was its content and other accesses that its competitors had better hold on. So they roped in Aamir Khan who is known for being a perfectionist and dedicated man. But this strategy never helped Snapdeal to get better, their marketing failed miserably all through these years.
Not to mention adding glitz and glam to marketing is necessary but quality and content remains to be the main aspects for a brand development.
Some of the great online brands outside India like
1. Amazon
2. AirBnB
3. Uber
4. Snapchat
5. Google
6. Facebook
7. Twitter
8. LinkedIn
9. Tripadvisor
have done a great job building their market over the years totally on their quality and content. They are now one of the most established brands on market.
So What Should Indian Online Brands Do?
1. The audience to be targeted
2. Communication with its consumers and getting feedback
3. Ensure communication with the user is actually helping in development and solving mistakes.
rather than spending hugely on celebrites.
