Celebrity Endorsement.

If a product or service is strategically designed and the customer feels delight after using that product or service and the if the experience is incomparable with the peer competitors than customer marries product/service.

To create and deliver a product/ service which is loved by the customer, the deliverable has to be unique, designed and developed keeping customer interest in mind and should be difficult to be copied/replicated by the competitors. If right strategies are followed for the product design and delivery then the brands can prevented themselves from turning to commodities.

There are lot many similar products (in hot drinks, electronics, sports gear etc), competing for the same customer segment, with there products being identical and compatible to each others in terms of price, quality and customer experiences. To distinguish themselves from there competitors they are forced to endorse celebrities for there marketing campaign as a result of which there final cost of product increases.

A close observation to the brand endorsement will revel that the celebrities keep on changing (take example of legendry golf player) based on the face value. It doesn’t really add much to the quality and deliverable of the product if “xyz” is brand ambassador for that and neither it is affected if “xyz” is replaced by the someone else.

The deliverable of company remains same and neither does it add any value to the customer by endorsing a specific celebrity.

One company (communication Industry) strategically entering into new mode of advertisement by using “zoozoo” (Dummy but live characters) for advertising its products and services. The benefit the company has in long term and short term are:

1. The company need not have to worry for endorsing celebrities as the character can be performed by anyone and everyone.


2. The advertisements are of low budget.


3. The advertisements are highly recognized and are to the target(delivering the message clearly).


4. No voice over effect is used, so dependency to a specific person voice is minimized.


5. Being low cost the company can by additional slots of the advertisement time.
   

You will also like to read Tiger Woods and the Coming Decline of Celebrity Endorsements

Vow, 7 Years

In my initial years of carrier I was working for a webhosting company and was majorly responsible for website development, maintenance and client communication. It was a nice job and I was happy with the job but not satisfied. I was not satisfied because there were very few things to do in terms of experimentation new things and very few opportunities to grow.

After working there for 2 years I joined another company, this company was promoter of a textile B2B portal http://www.fibre2fashion.com/. I joined in the capacity of senior software engineer. Being a Portal there were ample opportunities to explore and lot of new things to experiment and implement, I grabbed and exploited the opportunities to the fullest of my potential.Some of the statistic & numbers I remember

1. I very well remember there were 25 guys working for the portal and the head count of IT Team working behind the portal was of 7.
   


2. In 7 years of my carrier with this company I have seen a turnover of 65 professional in my functional area and the total head count growing to 150 from the initial count of 25.
   


3. I have seen movement of excellent talent during this tenure at every point of time.
   


4. I’ve seen association of “A” class companies with the portal and still counting them.
   


5. I’ve seen ISO 9001:2000 audit and faced the same at least 5 times, out of which 4 times I have been the Management Representative for the same
   


6. I’ve seen a sea level change in the IT Infrastructure from one server to 15 online servers
   


7. I’ve seen and witness and was instrumental in rooting aesthetic changes and adding new functionalities to the portal.
   


8. I’ve witnessed alexa.com Ranking moving from 50000+ to 8000+
   


9. I’ve seen page views for fibre2fashion.com rising from 500000+ in March 03 to 15000000+ in March 09 i.e. more than 30 times in 6 years
   
   Whenever I look back and think I realize that 7 years has passed away so fast (as if I have just blinked my eyes) and there are lot many things yet to be done.
   
   Though after a careful examination of what I wanted to be and what I am doing I found a total disparity, I always wanted to join armed forces (Indian Navy to be specific). It is not patriotism that encouraged but a sense of disciplined life, clear chain of commands and distinctiveness in itself.
   
   I don’t regret and I’m happy and enjoying whatever I’m doing because I tried to implement a disciplined life within myself and my surrounding, I tried to implement clear chain of commands and hierarchy in the current organization and tried to do things distinctively smarter and efficiently.
   
   I changed my success mantra a little bit and rephrased it to the below one”
   
   “Success consist of doing common things uncommonly well”
   
   

Image Source : http://www.thelawofattractionteacher.com/