Instead of going viral, when Tata Motors launched its new small car, it was quite literally struck by a virus. Unfortunately for the company, this happened right after the high-profile, globally renowned football star, Lionel Messi was roped in as the car’s brand ambassador.
Panic surrounding the Zika virus spread like wildfire, forcing Tata Motors to withdraw ‘Zica’ — the original name of the new small car — and rechristen it Tiago. It is still early to say if the brand’s association with the 2015 FIFA Ballon d’Or winner will help Tata climb back into reckoning in the small car segment, but as the industry insiders say, at least the company didn’t have to fork out a big fee for the endorsement contract.
Bollywood connect
However, automobile companies that sign up Bollywood celebrities and cricketers don’t get away with writing out fewer zeroes on their cheques. Filmdom and cricket are the two favourite hunting grounds for brands looking to leverage the power of Indian celebrities to boost awareness of their products. Almost all of them are expensive; but not all turn out to be successful brand associations.
Big names haven’t necessarily helped boost sales, as can be seen in many cases. Bollywood’s Big B, Amitabh Bachchan for example, has endorsed dozens of brands and is a huge success with some, in terms of brand awareness. Yet, the father-son duo — Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan — couldn’t help boost the sales of Maruti Suzuki Versa.
The story of Ranbir Kapoor and Nissan Micra is somewhat similar. By the time Toyota took on Aamir Khan as the brand ambassador for Innova, it was already a fairly successful vehicle in the market.
Brand effectiveness
Marketing case studies abound with topics that look at the effectiveness of brand ambassadors and the values they deliver. One of the findings is that it isn’t always possible to calculate the success of a celebrity brand ambassador based on the sales chart alone.
However, when a company is paying the celebrity an endorsement fee that is almost equivalent to a small country’s GDP, it is tempting to assume that his or her aura will some how magically lead to a surge in sales.
On the contrary, it is also not always possible to directly connect the market performance of the product to the celebrity endorsing it. The car or the bike being promoted has to have relevance and inherently possess the attributes necessary to make it a success in the market.
Man and machine fit
The celebrity can only assist in the brand building effort, that too only if the fit between man and machine has been thought through. Yamaha and John Abraham come to mind as an example.
A self-confessed biker, John is also an action star, a fitness enthusiast and very popular amongst young audiences — the right mix of attributes that make him the perfect ambassador of an up and rising bike brand.
The length of the relationship between a brand and a celebrity depends on the longevity of the celebrity and the continuation of the connect with the target audience. Older celebrities are often replaced by younger icons, especially for endorsing consumer non-durables and food.
Pepsi has, for example, changed its brand ambassador many times over the years. The same seems to be the case with TVS Motors, which is now increasingly choosing Virat Kohli over MS Dhoni for its ads.
The exception
However, this too has an exception. The one celebrity who has defied the pundits and their predictions is the Badshah of Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan, many of whose associations has stood the test of time running into a decade or more. He is the face of Tag Heuer, Lux, Nerolac and many more big names.
But his association with Hyundai is now over 18 years old. He started with Hyundai’s blockbuster small car — the Santro, Hyundai’s first vehicle for the Indian market. But he has since become the brand ambassador for the mother brand itself. The man claims “this could possibly be the longest surviving endorsement contract in the world, definitely in India”.
King Khan says most of his endorsements run for years. But the secret behind this longevity, he says, is the simple rationale of ‘survival of the fittest’. Both the brands have to remain fit at their core jobs to survive a relationship like this. And success comes only with innovation and hard work, says Shah Rukh.
It is tough not to attribute some of Hyundai’s success to the brand association with SRK, especially considering the car brand was unheard of about 20 years ago, when it first set foot on the Indian shores. But surely, the relevance and quality of their cars too had a lot to do with their success.