white paper : celebrity endorsements : brandmatch score

[email protected]

Derek M. BoyleFounder & CEO

WWW.BrandMatchScore.com

Empirical Synergies, Inc.

Q1.2015

MONEYBALL FOR MARKETING

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CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTs ::

THE EVOLVING SELECTION PROCESS & THE SCIENCE OF ELIMINATING SUBJECTIVITY

A WHITE PAPER

BRANDMATCHSCORE.com© EMPIRICAL SYNERGIES, INC. 2

For too long, marketers have lacked reliable and objective resources for determining the best match for their specific brand needs. Some go with the CEO’s choice, some attempt to cobble together various data points that exist in the market, and some, to put it bluntly, just throw ideas against the wall to see what sticks. The issue is that the data currently available to validate a major investment in a celebrity endorser is limited and untimely.

Industry standard rating tools provide snapshots of a celebrity’s popularity through annual surveys that do not account for the particular celebrity’s popularity at the precise time that a company may be looking to secure an endorser. As such, the information can quickly become outdated. Furthermore, the scoring of a celebrity’s popularity does not at all correlate directly to the brand’s key attributes or the specific campaign the brand or agency is looking to execute. Historically, the process of selecting celebrity endorsers has been costly and labor intensive and typically leads to subjective evaluations. Also, the services currently available to the marketers can be expensive, which precludes small and emerging businesses from access to affordable resources.

Brands take too many unnecessary risks when selecting and hiring celebrity spokespeople. Marketers spend countless hours researching information on a particular celebrity through web searches, paying for premium services to identify the general popularity of a celebrity and attempting to weigh the benefits of an association versus the opinions of their target consumers.

In the world we live in today, with information being so prevalent and technologies around us evolving so frequently, why do marketers insist on staying stagnant and relying on once innovative, but now archaic theories?

Products such as Q-Score provide a service that’s been around for a long time, and their data has been a stake in the ground for big decisions. However, there have been many documented viable alternatives that present far more effective solutions.

In the summer of 2012, three words led skin care conglomerate Nivea to cut ties with pop superstar Rihanna. [1] Their new CEO Stefan Heidenreich, publicly acknowledged and explained that he couldn’t see the compatibility between Rihanna and their core brand values. “Rihanna is a no go... I do not understand how to bring the core brand of Nivea in conjunction with Rihanna. Nivea is a company which stands for trust, family and reliability.”

In 2011, sports business reporter Darren Rovell eluded to this issue when he broached the topic of athletes being marketable to the right company. Matt Corey, CEO of Golfsmith, was quoted as saying “We’re always asking if athletes are marketable. But that’s the wrong question. The right question to ask is: Is this particular athlete marketable for this company? Is he the right guy to work with this creative?” [2]

Trust. Family. Reliability.

“I do not understand how to bring the core brand of Nivea in conjunction with Rihanna. Nivea is a company which stands for trust, family and reliability.” - CEO, Nivea

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/07/rihanna-nivea-video-stefan-heidenreich_n_1753414.html[2] http://www.themarketingarm.com/dirk-nowitzki-marketability.html


For decades, experts and scholars have tackled these issues. Brands spend the money regardless, so no organization has put in the time and effort to build an all-inclusive solution that better solves the problem. With over 10 years of compiling theories and viewpoints, we’ve identified three distinct hypotheses that individually present a valid argument, but collectively prove to be critical factors needed to select the ideal celebrity endorser.

Roobina Ohanian’s 1991 article on “matchup hypotheses,” explained that the core values of the brand must align with those of the endorser. [3] However, this cannot be based on what a group of executives believe to be true, or what a survey of a general population says. For the matchup to be accurate and valuable, the target consumers of the brand must be the subjects of the surveys making that determination.

In 1995, Paul Schaaf wrote an article discussing the function of career success in determining marketability. [4] His research suggested that while products like Q-Score measure likability and popularity, they fail to address

the fact that influence is a measure of on-field performance in conjunction with off-field marketability. For maximum exposure and for identifying the athlete that will best solve a brand’s business challenges, only considering popularity can lead to a failure of reaching the desired target audience.

Findings by Bayram Zafer Erdogan and Philip Kitchen (in 1998), addressed the integration of business objectives to the larger marketing strategy. [5] Their research suggested that when considering the use of an athlete endorser, it’s imperative that the campaign developed must be sound enough to solve the business challenge on its own.

Using The Correct Data

The numbers don’t lie... in many ways. The truth is, celebrity endorsements work. They increase brand awareness and sell product. The amount of money being paid to celebrities each year is staggering. When coupled with the funds earmarked to activate these partnerships, it’s clear that brands are making a significant investment in their selected spokesperson. In many instances, brands develop plans around their new star. However, the use of a celebrity endorser is meant to enhance the potential success of a marketing initiative that is pre-determined to solve a business challenge.

To properly identify the correct spokesperson, the celebrity must not only meet the matchup criteria, but also be believable to the target consumer in performing the duties required to carrying out the campaign. This is accomplished by analyzing empirical data.

And data doesn’t lie.

Celebrity Endorsements Aren’t Slowing Down

$6.7 Billion spent annually on Marketing Research in the U.S. [Council of American Survey Research Organization]

$1.1 Billionper year

on athletes

for better or worse!

$27.43 Billionon advertising

15% featurecelebrities

• $27.43 Billion spent on advertising per year(source: Sports Business Journal)

• 15% of all advertisements feature celebrities(source: Millward Brown)

• $1.1 Billion paid to athlete endorsers per year(source: Sports Business Journal)

Sports Industry Spending:

[3] Ohanian, R. (1991). The impact of celebrity spokesperson’ perceived image on consumers’ intention to purchase. Journal of Advertising Research, 31, 46-53.[4] Schaaf, P. (1995). Sport Marketing: It’s not just a game anymore. Amherst: Prometheus Books.[5] Erdogan, B.Z. & Kitchen, P.J. (1998). “How to Get the Most out of Celebrity Endorsers,” Admap, 33, No. 4 pp.17-22.


Today, more and more celebrities use social media to help build their brands and/or promote a product. With celebrities building massive followings through platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, there is a significant amount of information to analyze from their interactions with fans. There’s even more if you consider the comments through “mentions” or “hashtags”. Sure, you might be able to come up with a gauge of how people feel about a celebrity, but analyzing social sentiment data is still an evolving science.

It would be a great asset to be able to aggregate sentiment data from social web platforms, but there are too many unknowns. It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to completely determine the demographic makeup of consumers online. Therefore, to know exactly how your target audience feels about certain celebrities, collecting data through targeted consumer

surveys is an irreplaceable tool for determining marketability among a specific demo and selecting the right celebrity endorser for your brand. After all, the only people that need to believe in and relate to the celebrity are the folks purchasing your products or services.

Properly executed surveys can produce results with confidence levels of 97% and margins of error at +/- 2%. As users are increasingly concerned with privacy, tracking social sentiment is still an evolving science.

Social Sentiment vs. Consumer Surveys

Alternatively, if you had the ability to look retroactively at an athlete’s performance year to year, you might find that a target of yours goes from performing at an elite level one season, to off the map the next, and back to elite. If you’re looking to sign the athlete for multiple years, wouldn’t this type of trend identification help determine if you’ll get your full money’s worth?

Conversely, if you had your sights set on a different rising star, or an established veteran taking the league by storm, on the surface you might think it’s a great idea to jump on the bandwagon quickly. You might even look at general awareness / appeal data and feel good about the decision. But in today’s world, perceptions change quickly and that general data isn’t focused specifically to your target consumers in real-time. The lack of tools to identify marketability in real-time is problematic. While that star is rising, his marketability among your target consumers could be going in the wrong direction.

Tracking Performance And Marketability Trends

As a decision-maker, it’s easy to say you want the Peyton Manning’s of the world to endorse your product. But building a brand is a long-term endeavour. Companies spend millions of dollars and a lot of time developing marketing plans. As Erdogan and Kitchen pointed out, the campaign developed must solve the business challenge on its own. During the development process, keeping a close eye on potential celebrities can make the decision-making process much easier. For instance, say you’re planning to execute a two year campaign. You have a couple targets in mind but you’re six months out from selecting your spokesperson. Wouldn’t it make sense to track an athlete’s on-field performance?

Perhaps there’s a young star trending upwards that might align well with your brand and you were able to identify him early and lock him up at a fraction of the Manning-type fees.


However you come to a conclusion, let’s assume you have two celebrities you’d be comfortable hiring. What happens next? In most cases a third party booking agency is contacted and tasked with negotiating a deal with the celebrity (generally through his/her agent). Obviously, booking agents are helpful and can get the job done faster than anyone in your marketing department. But what leverage do you have to secure the best deal?

The answer goes back to “data doesn’t lie”. With your budget as a starting point for negotiations, you need to be aware of the campaign criteria and responsibilities asked of the celebrity and use the right data to create negotiation leverage.

Creating Leverage

Before diving into the search for celebrities, a company must know what it is they want to accomplish through the partnership. Understanding the necessary criteria is key to identifying the ideal fit for your brand and marketing campaign. You can make a list of factors and talk with a booking agent, but they may just try to finalize a deal quickly to make a commission.

What are the essential factors and how do they come into play to determine the right match? Wouldn’t it be beneficial if there were a platform that helped make sure that all the applicable criteria were met? Such a platform could allow you to do this on your time, without having to talk to a booking agent trying to push a specific celebrity prematurely.

Wouldn’t knowing exactly what celebrities and agents look at when determining how much they will charge for an engagement be helpful? Not only would this remove the angst associated with dealing with agents, but will also create the framework for identifying the correct athlete and creating the leverage needed to secure the best financial deal.

Understanding The Criteria Needed To Identify The Correct Celebrity

Each brand stands for something distinct and has different goals and objectives. Sifting through large vague lists of celebrity appeal ratings, which are often outdated, opens the door to subjectively making decisions.

To produce a more accurate picture of compatibility, a brand must focus specifically on its own core values and base the results on the opinions of their target consumers at the precise time the campaign is to be executed.

This can only be accomplished through real-time certified panel surveys. These direct results will provide a clear-cut analysis of how your intended customers feel about the alignment between what your brand stands for and the believability of a celebrity representing those same traits.

Quantifying The Relationship Of Specific Brand Attributes To Those Of A Celebrity


A celebrity’s current/potential influence goes much deeper than their number of Twitter or Instagram followers or how much face time they get on television. Enduring influence is not created overnight. For celebrities, it’s built by their success and marketability. Career success comes from expertise which results in the ability to reach a large audience. To achieve steady marketability, one must have credibility and build public trust. Measuring these together can provide a level of exposure a brand will receive from a particular celebrity.

Identifying Potential Influence By Measuring Career Success & Marketability

Let’s assume you want Celebrity “A”, but he’s looking for 20% more money than you’re willing to spend. Your second choice, Celebrity “B” is willing to accept your offer. Leverage is created by the data you’ve gathered. Celebrity “A” might be the established star, while Celebrity “B’s” marketability has been trending upwards for 4 months. And maybe they both align closely with your core brand attributes. Perhaps you go back to your campaign criteria and adjust the celebrity’s responsibilities and see if Celebrity “A” will accept the original offer, or if you’re willing to pay his higher fee, you ask for additional engagements to further enhance the campaign. Or maybe after making the adjustments you decide you don’t need all the appearances or extra photo shoots and you present a reduced offer to Celebrity “B” and put the savings towards additional media to further promote the program.

Evaluating Fees & Responsibilities To Maximize Campaign Value & Create Negotiation Leverage

John LynchVP - Head of U.S. Marketing, Reebok

Comprehensively measuring your criteria across all critical factors against each potential endorser is the ultimate due diligence.

This level of brand specific research data maximizes accuracy, eliminates subjectivity, creates negotiation leverage and mitigates risk from the endorser procurement process.

Measuring How Well An Endorser Meets Your Criteria Across All Marketable Factors

“More companies should take the time to understand the endorser landscape in a rigorous manner. Moneyball can be applied to marketing. Don’t just shoot from the hip.”


> Eliminates Subjectivity> Mitigates Risk> Justifies High Stakes Decisions

> Maximizes Campaign Value> Creates Negotiation Leverage> Provides Real-Time Analytics

Performing The Ultimate Due Diligence

The ‘industry norm’ is stuck in the past. It’s time for a paradigm shift away from the status quo to change the way marketers select and hire celebrity endorsers.

By providing real-time analytical support and due diligence, brands are no longer forced to make subjective decisions based on syndicated, static data that has no direct correlation to their key attributes or objectives.

Introducing BrandMatch Score :: A software-based market research tool that ratesthe compatibility between brands and endorsers.

Moneyball Can Be Applied To Marketing

While the competition ignores these factors when presenting data to their clients making endorsement decisions, our system takes all of the client’s criteria and 3 components collectively measured, produce a BrandMatch Score for each endorser exclusive to the brand.

Leveraging Each Critical Factor

Real-time results provide clients a comprehensive measurement of how well each endorser aligns with their brand & campaign objectives.

Analyzing the value of each component of BrandMatch Score allows marketers to make fully educated objective decisions.

BRAND ALIGNMENTQuantifies the qualitative relationship ofmutual attributes & positioning.

1

BUDGET ALIGNMENTEvaluates fees & responsibilities to maximize campaign value & create negotiation leverage.

3

BRAND BUILDING CAPABILITIESIdentifies potential influence measured by career performance & marketability.

2

Unlike other rating tools, BrandMatch Score produces endorser specific results, customized to each individual brand in real-time. A client submits their endorsement criteria through an online account and a survey is administered to its specific target consumers, while our platform simultaneously pulls statistical career performance data of each endorser.

Timing Is EverythingDISCOVERY

DATA COLLECTION

CONSUMER INSIGHT

DON’T ENDORSE WITHOUT IT

Empirical Synergies is a Market Research firm servicing the sports & entertainment industry.

Formed to address the growing presence of big data and analytics in thehigh-stakes decision making process – we offer a suite of

web based analytical tools to improve efficiency and accuracy.

About Empirical Synergies, Inc.

© EMPIRICAL SYNERGIES, INC. 2015

white paper : celebrity endorsements : brandmatch score

Data & Analytics