Celebrity Endorsement - Through the Ages
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Themes: Marketing
Pub Date : 2004
Countries : India
Industry : Advertising
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Case Code : MCS005
Case Length : 7 Pages
Price: INR 250;
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Celebrity Endorsement – Through the Ages
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Micheal Jordan and Tiger Woods endorsing it. Wheaties aggressively adopted celebrity endorsing and 46 of the 51 players selected for the 1939 Major League All-Star Baseball Game endorsed Wheaties at the time.7 Among the earliest evidences of an endorser's overt approval for using his testimonials was the case of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, a highly revered preacher. Suffering from a case of hay fever, Rev. Beecher found a good cure in Dr. M M Townsend's Remedy for Hay Fever, Asthma and Catarrh. He sent Dr. Townsend two separate letters praising the medicine and also telling him that he was 'at liberty to make such use of this letter as may secure the relief of all hay fever patients8. Dr. Townsend used the full text of both the letters in a package insert of the product box. Till the early 1930s, the major endorsers were athletes, but by 1945, movie stars like Charlie Chaplin were more sought-after. With the rising popularity of the color TV in 1965, TV personalities and entertainers also became popular. By 1975, one in eight TV commercials featured a celebrity. Researchers Robert Clark and Ignatius Horstmann of Boston University studied a collection of 1000 endorsement advertisements from 1920-1970 and found from that they were predominantly used by cigarettes, beauty products, beverages and audio equipment.9 |
By 1980, companies started making products around celebrities. Standard Brands Inc, for example, created a new candy bar called "Reggie", after New York Yankees' superstar Reggie Jackson. Faberge Inc., introduced an entire new line of Farrah Fawcett hair-care products. Athlete endorsements picked up again in 1984 when Nike discovered a young and extremely talented basketball player, Michael Jordan. Nike relied heavily on Jordan’s 'image' to make itself a global mega-brand. In 1989, out of 59 celebrities employed by Coke, 48 were athletes. Almost 75% of all sports-related products like clothes and shoes used athletes to endorse their brands.
Athletes like Jordan, Bo Jackson, Chris Evert and Bill Cosby dominated the late 1980 s. The growth in the number of sports endorsers was attributed to changes in the sports industry that began in the 1970s with free agency. Free agency allowed an athlete to market himself or herself for the best possible price to any team upon the expiration of a contract10."It allowed salaries, because of competition, to really increase exponentially. And when the salaries started to go up, the popularity of sports in general started to go up. You had a combustible combination that really spawned the sports marketing industry that we're in now, and the dollars that athletes earn for endorsements are directly tied to how much they earn on the field11,"explained Bob Williams, President of Burns Celebrity Sports, a 20-year-old firm that represents companies in sponsorship contracts with celebrities.
7]www.wheaties.com
8]Ketcham, Steve, "Celebrity endorsements are a thing of the past (and present), The Old Times, February 2001
9]op cit "Celebrity Endorsements"
10]op cit "The celebrity sell: advertisers use black celebrity endorsers to pump up sales"
11]ibid