Cell Phone Majors Ring Up Stars To Count Sales Figures

[@ksh@T 20]

NEW DELHI: When Meridian Mobile appointed pacer Ishant Sharma as the brand ambassador for its Fly mobiles, they weren’t exactly blazing a trail. Almost all major cell phone brands today have a popular face to boot. While Sony Ericsson boasts of Hrithik Roshan, Motorola has Abhishek Bachchan doing duty. Katrina Kaif endorses Spice Mobiles, and cell phone majors Nokia and Samsung are the latest to join the brigade with Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan, respectively.

After colas, perhaps, cell phones are the only other consumer category where celebrity endorsers have become the norm.

Says Spice Mobiles marketing head Payal Gaba: “A brand ambassador is a must have in this category. When we first appointed Priyanka Chopra, no other manufacturer had brand ambassador. Now, the market has got cluttered and we need them to cut clutter.”

Interestingly, the companies are also spending more on advertising that contributes to burgeoning sales. Around 90-100 million handsets were sold last year in India. “Our sales zoomed after we roped in Malaika Arora. We will hit the 1,00,000 handset sales figure this month,” says Meridian Mobile CEO Rajiv Khanna.

Whether it is brand repositioning, as in the case of Samsung Mobiles, or carrying out routine campaigns as in Nokia’s case, most companies have depended on popular faces at different points in time to get noticed. But Nokia India marketing director Devender Kishore feels otherwise.

“We appoint ambassadors only according to the relevance of the situation. We have aligned ourselves with celebrities routinely for specific campaigns. Be it an AR Rahman concert or ones by Shakira, Nelly Furtado, the association has always been strategic,” he affirms.

“Apart from a brief stint with John Abraham, Samsung never really had an ambassador. Of course, mobile companies can do without them. Appointing a celebrity makes sense only when the move delivers greater value,” opines Prathap Suthan, national creative director, Cheil Communications, the in-house agency that handles Samsung Mobiles account.

Speaking on whether handset marketers can do well without brand ambassadors, O&M group creative director Abhijit Avasthi says: “They definitely can. A smart marketer needs to figure out why he needs the ambassador rather than reasoning that the competitor has it. Motorola’s advertising is equally popular with or without Abhishek. Plus, some of India’s best works like Fevicol and Surf Excel are without brand ambassadors.”

Traditionally, fast moving consumer goods and consumer durables manufacturers have a tendency to hire brand ambassadors’ services, many a time driven by competitors having one.

“If you look at the celebrities used by different companies, they are very different. For small manufacturers who have comparatively limited marketing budgets, it is all the more essential to have ambassadors to get noticed,” feels Shurojit Chatterji, executive vice-president, Contract Advertising, Spice Mobiles’ creative agency.

Motorola has just renewed its contract with Abhishek Bachchan, extending an association that dates back to April 2006. “The industry can do without them also,” says Lloyd Mathias, the company’s marketing director, India and South-West Asia. He reveals that the company’s business doubled in 2006 and did exceedingly well last year too.

“When we launched in India, we wanted an Indian connect and Abhishek did the job for us. We have launched award-winning campaigns with and without him. Appointing ambassadors actually depend on what we want to communicate,” he signs off.

but to me it hardly matters who endorses the brand, i better go with quality and my choice. . .