Superstars: Not Necessarily the Solution
By John Morgan
Managing Director, GolinHarris in Hong Kong

So, you've gone through all the strategy sessions, and like it or not, you realize you need a celebrity to help Client A make some waves to build their brand - particularly since Client A is a multinational with no real advertising budget and little resources on the ground in your pocket of Asia Pacific.

I'm not going to debate the use of celebrities in consumer PR. We all know it works well in some cases and not so well in others. Let's focus instead on the challenges many of us face today when the decision is made to use celebrities: limited budgets and the resulting need to be extremely practical yet creative in which celebrity we choose to endorse products; and then how we use said celebrity.

By both necessity (reduced budgets) and general disappointment, I've moved away from A-grade celebrities. Today, I'm a big fan of well-known personalities not quite in the A-grade celebrity mix - ambitious sorts with names strong enough to attract attention who also realize they need effective, long-term partnerships to help them advance their own careers. I hesitate to give this group a title like B-grade or Tier Two because that downgrades this underrated breed that can do an incredible job of building brands and selling products. But since we have to call these folks something, let's call the A-Graders the "Superstars," and their counterparts "Stars."

Here's a focus-on-the-fundamentals approach we've used with our "Stars":

Solid negotiation to ensure an effective partnership.
First, we interview the Stars like we would any new hire to get a good feeling of how well they would be able to deliver key brand messages. Second, we ask them to commit to learning about the brand and product - the emphasis here is that we need more than photo ops. We work hard to make sure it's a win/win situation from the start for both sides.

Familiarization Trips to Corporate HQ
We speed up the learning curve by taking the Stars to the client's base, where they learn all there is to know about becoming an effective spokesperson. Very often, we can package this experience with a media familiarisation trip to simultaneously generate media coverage. This works particularly well when the client is based in an interesting locale and can showcase manufacturing or R&D.

Advertorials
We generate plenty of photo ops during the familiarisation trip, which can be re-cycled in a variety of ways, particularly advertorials.

Cross partnerships
Most Stars are diligently working their careers over a number of directions such as sports, recording, film, etc. We leverage our existing relationship to create new opportunities by sponsoring our Stars' other activities, as appropriate.

Extend the budget
You obviously save cost by not using the Superstars. We leverage these savings to do more activities throughout the year.

Stay the course
We've had Stars become Superstars during the course of our multi-year partnership. We then simultaneously enjoy the benefits of both a Star and a Superstar.

There you go. My apologies to the Superstars I've worked with over the years (not that any of you remember me), but the Stars are just not the second choice any more...and for good reason.