As a business and marketing tool, celebrity endorsement is a double-edged sword, much like humour is (see MW post WIELDING THE SWORDS OF HUMOUR). The difference is that the cost, and therefore the stakes, for celebrity endorsement is usually much higher than they are for humour. Forget for a moment that the concept of celebrity in Western society is an oddly moving target these days (odd as in the wrong direction).
As with most marketing concepts, celebrity endorsement is reptilian-brain simple: I love the person/what they stand for/what they can do, therefore I love the product/service/opinion they endorse. But rather than run down the list of celebrity endorsements that have gone horribly wrong (no, the Nike/Tiger Woods partnership still isn’t one yet – see NIKE, TIGER & PAYBACK), I’d like to show you one that really works for me.
Last May/June, Toyota Canada created two long videos featuring NBA superstar Steve Nash. Have a look:
First of all, you couldn’t pick a safer sports celebrity. Nash is:
- universally recognised as a superstar & future Hall of Famer in his sport
- Canadian
- personally stable and publicly squeaky-clean to a fault, as in almost boring, as in the Wayne Gretzky of Hoops
- not over-exposed for celebrity endorsement
In fact, the creative here has fun with Nash’s public persona and shows us that underneath all that dedication to greatness, and constantly improving on that greatness, there is a real and interesting person. Someone who isn’t boring to a fault. Or embarrassingly self-effacing. Someone with a genuine but quirky & off-beat sense of humour. Wait a minute—isn’t that what we call being a Canadian? I think it is.
And who is Toyota? Isn’t that the Japanese company that quietly and stealthily became the biggest automotive brand in the world? Isn’t Toyota the brand that painstakingly built its reputation on practicality, safety and reliability rather than extravagance, styling and sexiness? Isn’t Toyota the brand that was publicly flayed a year and a half ago for having defective braking and acceleration systems, put through a US congressional probe and ended up recalling 7.5 million vehicles in North America over the issue? Weren’t senior Toyota executives roundly criticised for not instantly apologising to the public for their errors with abject effusiveness? [1] And isn’t Toyota the brand that was totally exonerated for the braking & acceleration problems by the NHTSA & NASA in February, 2011, a few months before this campaign started? I think is was.
This Canadian campaign says all the right things about Toyota to Canadians. It’s brilliant, in a Canadian way. No “WE TOLD YOU SO”. Instead, a clever return to what made Toyota a great brand all along. But oddly, the marketing industry hasn’t seen it that way (if the blogoshere is any indication), and the campaign seems to have ended after these two spots. So maybe this isn’t such brilliant marketing after all? Oh I think it is.
- There was some relevant precedence for Toyota’s behaviour throughout this ordeal. In the mid-80s, a CBS 60 Minutes segment accused Audi of “sudden unintended acceleration” causing deaths. The five-year fallout almost ruined Audi in North America. It was eventually proven that 60 Minutes had engineered the failure for its episode. The NHTSA ended up exonerating Audi, 60 Minutes did not. Audi eventually revived itself to become the fastest growing luxury car brand in North America in the last five years, but the incident set Audi back at least 10 years.
