Often, celebrities contract to endorse a product, but should they use the produc

Question

Often, celebrities contract to endorse a product, but should they use the product regularly, or even like the product before they are allowed to claim that they “endorse” the product?

If you were assigned to sell a product called “Sweet Treats” with the slogan, “so sweet, it will make you tweet,” but you thought the product tasted sour, and not at all sweet, what would you do?

Explore where the line is between harmlessly implying that someone is promoting a product, and someone dishonestly claiming that they genuinely believe the product is the best.

Explanation / Answer

The issue that we are going to address here is “honesty in brand endorsements”. Let’s understand a little background on the problem. Often, we see celebrities endorsing brands they might not have used or are little familiar with. But the celebrity endorsement process has a lot of background research and the marketing team of a company mainly looks at the reach of a celebrity and what target audience range is. Also, its many a times not necessary for the ambassador to be a celebrity. We are increasingly witnessing the concept of “influencers”, mostly on social media. To address this problem, we need to understand the aim of the marketing team of a company. They need most eyeballs on their ads and people who can influence the decisions of the customers.

Now let’s discuss what happens when a celebrity/ influencer is approached for an endorsement. Considering the situation given in the question. On approach, the first question, if I have never seen the product before that will arise from my side would be “what is the product and what the advertisement is going to be about”? As mentioned in the question, the claim of the company is clearly not true according to me and I don’t feel confident with the product. Now there are several factors that arise for an optimum decision making. Financial aspect will definitely be one of the driving factors for this decision. Influencers/ celebrities have financial goals and would definitely like to work towards it. Now, for me, it all comes down to how critical the company’s claim is, to what extent and how will it affect the customer. For example, for the situation mentioned in the question, i.e., a completely different taste from the claimed is quite critical and is major factor for making the customer choose this product. So, I would honestly explain the company my views on the product and ask them to endorse someone who’s confident in their claim. This will be good for both parties as even the advert will not look believable since I am not confident in the product. Now as an extra example, let’s consider a situation wherein, a soap company claims that it’s the best for skin but I personally like some other soap and have not used this product extensively. This product is also good but personally I prefer some other product. Here, the opinion is my personal and product might be best for some other users. Here, on analyzing the negatives and positives, on a practical approach, I would choose my financial benefit over my personal choice and would go ahead to endorse the product.

Same situation is with celebrities. They have an experienced and professional PR team who analyses all the positives and negatives of the situation and an informed and practical decision is taken.

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