As consumers, we are much accustomed to the use of a celebrity endorsement to sell us things.  In the early days it was athletes, war heroes pushing product, then with the advent of television in came a whole new host of celebrities paid to play as endorsers of everyday items.  It’s a simple trade really; the famous and beautiful lend their shiny allure or values to influence the purchaser to buy stuff.  The hook-up equals brand.

Maybe it’s a recession-chic thing but increasingly ‘brand stories’ are being told by the people that work in the organisation themselves.  We’ve just seen Air New Zealand’s much-feted CEO Rob Fyfe putting his own butt on the line by getting undressed in the airline’s latest TVC.  But he was not alone, other Air New Zealand staff got naked for the cause as well.

What about the ethical endorser?  Recently in the US, an ordinary, everyday CEO of a not-for-profit became the face of Doritos chips. Doritos are a Pepsi product and Kjerstin Erickson is the CEO of Forge, a US-based non-profit organisation that works with displaced communities in Africa. At first the marriage seems unlikely until ones thinks of the mutual benefit; the Doritos get a leg up in terms of ethical reputation and Forge gets all over the place.

This is clever, because using a super-famous celebrity endorser can sometimes be overpowering. As lessons learned from the recent ‘Great-Free-Chicken Fiasco’ will bare witness.  Oprah Winfrey kindly treated ‘the entire internet’ to two pieces of KFC by suggesting people get on ine and download a coupon. It was mayhem. Fervent with the idea of free stuff, servers were crashed, participating stores were slammed and the end result was a near riot, as KFC was not able to deliver on the mass demand. A generous concept became a PR *fail* because the offer way outstripped the ability of the Fried Chicken seller to deliver.  Back to our stripping CEO Rob Fyfe; the trick here is to keep it simple, if the front-end makes a promise, do ensure the back-end can make good on it. Delivering on a promise has got to be the best brand story ever.

Tags: advertising, air new zealand, Brand, celebrity endorsement, ethical endorsements, PR, recession-chic, television

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 9:49 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.