Several companies use celebrities in marketing to bring attention to their products, whether it’s a sports star aligning his success with a sports drink or a movie star lending their fame to the newest automobile. It might be a natural pairing like Michael Jordan and his Nike shoes or a looser connection like Tiger Woods pushing Buick vehicles. However, signing an endorser does not automatically increase mindshare or, more importantly, sales. The partnership must resonate with the fans and consumers and just make plain sense for a partnership. More than just signing a celebrity, a company should have strong marketing plan to support the (usually sizeable) spend. Planning, activation and evaluation should be incorporated to the strategy at every step of the way.
Last week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, a robotics company named TOSY hired Justin Bieber to make an appearance at their booth. This brought a lot of foot traffic to the booth located on the back of the exhibition hall that would most likely not have been on that end of the show floor. However, it was very ineffective as the queue and the appearance in general were very poorly managed. The flow of traffic was not organized and hundreds of folks that were just trying to get by were stuck in the mob scene and those that were hoping to see “Biebs” were fighting for space in unorganized spaces. From a marketing standpoint, there were a lot of people there, but they were not there to see TOSY. TOSY failed because they failed to capitalize on the Bieber appearance. Understanding that the people were there to see Justin, TOSY should have had displays to inform and entertain the crowd while waiting in line for an autograph. They should have given away branded items or had employees data capture to know who was at their booth. At the very least, they could have displayed their products, zero of which were located anywhere near the booth. Except for the two TOSY signs in the photo above (and I’d argue that TOSY doesn’t have enough brand recognition to rely on a simple sign or logo), there was no way to differentiate this spot from any other booth of the million plus square feet of exhibits at CES.
Balls & Bytes 