The Dangers of Attaching Your Brand to a Celebrity Spokesperson

Breaking The Mold, Bringing Marketing Back, Content You Need To Read, If You're Not Doing This, You Should Be, Marketing 101

Good Endorsements… Gone Bad

It takes years and patience to build a world-class brand with a huge following. But who has time for that these days? If you’re all out of good marketing ideas, you can just hire somebody famous to be the face of your brand!

Be sure to pick somebody who’s at the top of their game. Somebody with a zillion followers on Twitter or Instagram. Tiger Woods, maybe, or Lance Armstrong. Or Olympic champions – they’re a sure-fire bet, right?

Even better if they’re the feel-good story of the moment. South African amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius captured the hearts of millions by moving from Paralympic competition (where he’d won three consecutive gold medals) to competing in the 2012 London Olympics, the first double leg amputee to qualify for the biggest running competition in the world.

It was a great story, and Nike jumped on board with an ad campaign featuring several athletes with a voiceover that spoke of athletes’ bodies being their weapons. A print advertisement featuring Pistorius read “I am the bullet in the chamber.” The next year, in 2013, Pistorius was charged and later convicted of murdering his girlfriend with a 9MM pistol. Oh, the irony!

Nike has been bitten by celebrity endorsements before; past ads have featured Lance Armstrong (doping), Michael Vick (dogfighting), and Tiger Woods (caught cheating on his wife multiple times), and trust us, the list goes on from here.

Nike Shoes

It doesn’t matter if you have the most wholesome product in the world – you can still fall prey to bad celebrity endorsements. The “Got Milk?” campaign (you know the one, famous people with cute milk mustaches over their lips) dropped R&B performer Chris Brown in 2009 after he pleaded guilty to violently assaulting his former girlfriend Rihanna. Not a good look for the moo.

One essential feature of celebrity brand endorsements is that they appear genuine. No one wants to see the marketing hacks making sausage behind the scenes. So if you find a celebrity willing to spontaneously declare her love for your brand online, take the time to teach them the basic skills of cut and paste.

Here’s the caption that went with model Naomi Campbell’s Instagram post showing off her new pair of Adidas: “Naomi, So nice to see you in good spirits!!! Could you put something like: Thanks to my friend @gary.aspden and all at adidas – loving these adidas 350 SPZL from the adidas Spezial range. ✊ @adidasoriginals.”

Cut and paste fail, Naomi!

Lori Loughlin of Full House and Hallmark Channel fame and her fashion designer husband Mossimo Giannulli plead guilty to bribery charges in a widely- publicized college admissions scandal in 2019. Loughlin and Giannulli paid $500,000 to have their daughters gain admission to USC as members of the rowing team, a sport which neither girl had ever participated in.

Loughlin’s daughter Olivia Jade had a promising and lucrative career as an online influencer, working with brands Dolce & Gabbana, Marc Jacobs, Sephora, and Amazon. Most dropped her like a hot potato after the cheating scandal became public, even though her mother was the culprit. (Loughlin lost her Hallmark Channel gig as well.) It’s good to remember that celebrities also have families who can do bad all by themselves.

Finally, if your brand invests in sponsorship, please ask the celebrities connected with it to play along. Soccer megastar Cristiano Ronaldo of Team Portugal cost Coca-Cola about $4 billion in market value after a Euro 2020 tournament press conference. Coca-Cola had a sponsorship agreement with the Union of European Football Associations, and the league had placed two bottles of the soft drink prominently at the podium in front of Ronaldo in a classic product placement move. Unfortunately, Ronaldo believes in healthy living and a clean diet. He looked visibly distressed by the bottles, giving them the stink eye before moving them out of the camera frame and holding up a bottle of water. He held the water bottle up and said in Portuguese: [Drink] “Water!”

Coca-Cola’s share price dropped by 1.6% to $55.22 soon after the press conference. The market value went from $242 billion to $238 billion — an expensive lesson in how celebrity endorsements will always be, a double-edged sword.

The practice of celebrity endorsements will continue for brands, and most of the time, the relationship will evolve just fine. However, understand that people have a bad habit of behaving badly in inopportune times. If your brand is caught in the middle of a public relations disaster, it could get ugly.

You’ve been warned.

About Atlas Rose: Atlas Rose is a Christian led marketing leadership company focusing on bringing executive-level help to small and medium-sized businesses. By offering fractional CMO’s integrated with their client’s leadership team, they effectively impact the company culture and mission. The result is a predictable, measurable, and effective lead flow for just a fraction of what a full-time marketing department would cost. They can be reached at info@atlasroseco.com or 762-533-5007.

Should You Cut Your Marketing Budget?

Bringing Marketing Back, Content You Need To Read, If You're Not Doing This, You Should Be, Marketing 101

Should You Cut Your Marketing Budget in Tough Times?

Almost all businesses go through cycles when times are good, and other times of…PANIC MODE! Perhaps it’s when you lose your biggest customer or have a supply challenge or experience a full-blown recession like in 2008.

When you’re faced with more adversity than you care to have, it’s prudent to spring into action and look at every dollar leaving your organization. It can be tempting to completely strike out the marketing expense because unlike your other expenses, where you receive a good or service, in exchange of your dollars, the marketing expense can be a bit unclear. Which of your marketing is working? Is it working at all?

While it’s true, slicing marketing expenditures from your budget might provide some immediate relief, it also accelerates your downward spiral and could be a death sentence.

Kevin Miller, fractional CMO with Atlas Rose offers his perspective. “We’re not naive about the need to trim expenses relating to marketing if no other option exists. However, rather than eliminating it all, consider taking a deeper dive and operate with a scalpel rather than a chainsaw.”

He’s referring to the many smaller expenses that contribute to the overall marketing engine of a company. “The first thing we want to do is to take care of existing relationships. These are customers that love you and you love them back. Because they are considered promoters, they make repeat purchases and express their satisfaction to others. We don’t want to abandon them. We’ve found that if the situation calls for it, we’ll ask for their continued support during a tough time. If they can push up their timeline for a purchase, or take on more stock, it may just be the lifeline the business needs.”

Next, if you still need to make cuts, cut the general branding dollar but keep your money on direct lead collection marketing.. Your CMO (if you have one) should be able to communicate where the best and most direct ROI channels exist in your marketing plan. It’s not that general branding doesn’t work, it’s just that it’s a longer game and the path to a direct sale isn’t as definitive.

Understand that not spending precious dollars on marketing and advertising does eventually have an effect. It’s the same reason you still see Pepsi and Coca-Cola battle it out even after 100+ years. Even a half percent of market share is worth millions of dollars. If either one of them stopped advertising, it wouldn’t take long for one brand to cede hard-fought market share to the other. Once that momentum is lost, it can be hard to regain.

Companies of all sizes are flocking to fractional chief executives.

Miller’s best advice is to slow down. Take a deep breath and work with your marketing team to justify essential expenditures. Making knee-jerk reactions is dangerous. The best moves are calculated and methodical. Once business returns to normal levels, you’ll be able to take more measured risks with your marketing dollars. The extra scrutiny may even have a positive effect on your business and cause sales to increase.

About Atlas Rose: Atlas Rose is a Christian led marketing leadership company focusing on bringing executive-level help to small and medium-sized businesses. By offering fractional CMO’s integrated with their client’s leadership team, they effectively impact the company culture and mission. The result is a predictable, measurable, and effective lead flow for just a fraction of what a full-time marketing department would cost. They can be reached at info@atlasroseco.com or 762-5233-5007.

What Is A Real Deal CMO

Breaking The Mold, Bringing Marketing Back, If You're Not Doing This, You Should Be, Marketing 101

What Is a Real Deal CMO?

It seems like everyone’s an expert nowadays. Enter the era of the electronic resume (LinkedIn) and you can adjust your job titles at will. Of course, everyone is gunning for the job they want so stretching the truth is tempting to do.

If you were really a marketing coordinator, maybe you self-label yourself as the “marketing manager.”

If you were really a marketing manager, modifying your Linkedin profile to indicate “Marketing V.P.” really is about the same right?

Well, not even close. We in the biz call those people marketing imposters.

While little white lies on your computer screen don’t seem like a big deal, it could be a big problem for the business owner that hires talent ill-equipped for the job.

So, if you need Chief Marketing Officer Level support for your growing company, who should you hire?

The former head of digital media for XYZ corp?
The social media marketing lead for the largest company in the industry?
The head of content creation and automation for North America?

Answer: none; Not because these wouldn’t be great additions to the team, it’s because they chose a different and specialized path to hone their marketing industry skills.

A true CMO is something entirely different.

A CMO is someone that loves strategy. They think differently and have a vision of how individual parts and tactics work together to achieve a goal. They’re highly intelligent and are up to any C-level decision. Expect them to be an extension of the CEO and maybe even assume that role someday.

Here’s what they’re not:

Every organization and marketing plan calls for tacticians. These are people skilled in a particular segment of marketing. It might be pay-per-click advertising, copywriting, or web development. A CMO can’t do these things for you – but they know people who can. For decades they have been developing relationships with the most effective vendors and people in the industry.

A CMO understands their capabilities and knows what success looks like, but they haven’t spent thousands of hours invested in executing the finer details. They think on a higher level.

The CMO is a trusted member of the executive team and someone the CEO, CIO, and CFO lean on when making decisions. For a growing business looking to scale, it’s a critical skill set to have.

But there is a catch. CMO’s can be expensive.

Source: Salary.com

When you include benefits, competitive CMO salaries soar to $312,040. Ouch.

Even if that’s a figure you can get comfortable with, you better hope you make the right hiring decision. If you get it wrong and onboard the wrong person, it’s very, very painful. You may not realize you made the wrong hire for a year or longer. If you have to terminate them, the consequences are horrific.

Time lost. Your company could have grown
Competitors gained ground
Lost Salary
Opportunity costs
Stress on your team
CEO embarrassment
And the list continues…

But is there a better way? There may be.

You may be able to share a successful CMO with another company. The concept is called fractional executives and it is already well proven for CIOs, CFO’s and others. It’s now available for the marketing function of a business. You get the full benefit of an executive team member, for a fraction of the cost. It’s been gaining traction because there is much to gain for business owners and little to lose.

Business owners and CEOs can interview a handful of CMO candidates and choose the one that they have the best rapport with and possesses relevant industry experience.

Need a CMO with industry experience in e-commerce, healthcare, outdoors, SAAS, or others? Chances are, there is someone out that that is perfect.

One company in the space is Atlas Rose. They have CMO’s already on the payroll outsourced to clients. The company arms these strategic thinkers with the tools they need to be most effective.

Using a CMO in this way takes most or all of the risks out of the hiring decision and because the salary is split with other companies, it’s affordable too, starting at just a few thousand dollars per month for most companies. In Atlas Roses’ program, they include a dedicated marketing manager that makes sure no day-to-day details fall through the cracks.

Real deal CMO’s aren’t built overnight. Finding a great one to align yourself with could mean the difference between existing in mediocrity or excelling to be the top player in your industry.

If you decide to go it alone, proceed with caution and look at those LinkedIn profiles with a critical eye.

About Atlas Rose: Atlas Rose is a Christian led marketing leadership company focusing on bringing executive-level help to small and medium-sized businesses. By offering fractional CMO’s integrated with their client’s leadership team, they effectively impact the company culture and mission. The result is a predictable, measurable, and effective lead flow for just a fraction of what a full-time marketing department would cost. They can be reached at info@atlasroseco.com or 762-5233-5007.