Are only celebrities a better bet for Brand building?

Celebrities create a brand recognition for sure, for example when we see Federer, Rolex automatically comes in our mind. So in that case yes. However its the end users who, I feel, are the better bet because if they are not satisfied (or delighted) with the product/services they are consuming, no celebrity can help in building a brand. for example take Fiat Palio, Abhishek Bachchan endorsed it but since it doesn't live up to the customer satisfaction its gone, a flop if I may say. On the other hand take McD or KFC they are big brands and are living up to the consumers' satisfaction (or delight) but I don't recollect if there is any celebrity who is endorsing it... So I don't agree.

It totally depends on the tone/creative direction of the Ad.

I can give the example of Reid and Taylor which uses Amitabh Bachan as its brand Ambassador and Raymonds which uses any good model.

Toyota also does this form of advertising in Car Magazines wherein they publish a review by a user of the car.

But in certain products in which the advertisers want to convey the excellence of their product by relating it to a character who practices excellence in his profession like the ad of Rolex featuring Roger Federer playing Tennis in black suit, It requires a publicly accepted  professionally successful personality.

Moreover its all dependent on how creative the ad is in capturing the interest of the target audience. Either you can or you cannot but its safer to use an ad which has a Star as it catches the interest of the audience quickly .

Incase of an ad without a star then there has to be an idea which can capture that attention from the audience. I feel the former is a safe and the latter is a more risky approach. To follow the latter format , the advertiser has to come up with a brilliant flow of idea to convey the message in a short span of time.

So in short the real celebrity is the idea who uses a subject to convey the message. The subject can be a commoner or a celebrity.

Like i said in one of the earlier posts, a celebrity definitely does help in brand building but it will not sustain. Because over a point of time the celebrioties brand value will exceed that of your brand and also the ups and downs of that celebrity will only hurt the brand. Perfect case in example is Tiger Woods. When he was down in the dumps, all y you, the brands dumped him and even though Nike has returned with him, it has not yet succeeded in creating an impact. Take the example quoted by you, why has nike resorted to so many celebrities to endorse its brand ? Its simply because when the celebrities brand value threatened to take over or looked like waning, it simply switched over to another one. After all celebrities are not immortal and neither are their popularity.

A couple of years back when i was a handling the Samsung account we were sponsoring the enitre indian team and were using them to push sales of our products. Six months into the deal we realised the gross mistake as the team in its entirety was not performing well and hence we had to drop them. Subsequently we used individual celebrities to launch specific models like John Abraham for one of the mobile models. After using him for two years we stopped and by that time the brand was strong enough to stand on its own leg.

not really, too much of it can go against the brand.. sometimes a fresh face can can promote it better. it all depends on the audience and strategy.