Gossip Grils and celebrity endorsement

One of the most powerful TV series nowadays is Gossip Girl, which is proof of amazing fashion, which viewers can see. You can see the designers from Stella McCartney, Dolce Gabbana, Valentino, Victoria Beckham, Mar by Marc Jacobs etc.

Dolce Gabbana top, Valentino

 

Christian Dior

There is six main characters: Blair Waldorf, Serena Van der Woodsen, Charlie Rhoodes, Chuck Bass, Nate Archibald and Dan Humpfrey.

Victoria Beckham spring dress

Fashion in serias is important because we, as a customers have tendency to copy the style which we see in TV or we like.  This lead to buying more clothes products from fast fashion retailers and increasing a presstige of designers. Some brands use celebrity as a part of their brand image and nowadays celebrity endorsement is important part of our lives.

Marchesa dress

Blake Lively who play Serena Van der Woodsen in Gossip Girl became a face of Chanel.
Leighton Meester who play Blair Waldorf is a face of Vere Wang parfume.

Celebrity endorsements have proven very successful in China where, due to increasing consumerism, it is considered a status symbol to purchase an endorsed product, according to Boorstin 2012.

"A sign of a celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.”                                                 Daniel J Boorstin

The celebrity endorsement is definitely a part of Gossip Girl. They were normal people, who was not actresses and because of Gossip Girl, they became very popular. Designers are happy to sign up for collaboration with the series because it bring them benefits.

“Any brand can get a celebrity. That is easy. But getting a celebrity consistent with the right brand, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way... that is not easy.”

There are some advantages of celebrity endorsement:

• Establishment of Credibility: Approval of a brand by a star fosters a sense of trust for that brand among the target audience- this is especially true in case of new products..
• Ensured Attention: Celebrities ensure attention of the target group by breaking the clutter of advertisements and making the ad and the brand more noticeable.
• PR coverage : is another reason for using celebrities. Managers perceive celebrities as topical, which create high PR coverage. A good example is Gossip Girls. Celebrity are covered by most media from television to newspapers. 
• Higher degree of recall: People tend to commensurate the personalities of the celebrity with the brand thereby increasing the recall value. Golf champion Tiger Woods has endorsed American Express, Rolex, and Nike. Actress Catherine Zeta-Jones is used by T-Mobile and Elizabeth Arden. 007 Pierce Brosnan promotes Omega, BMW, and Noreico.
• Associative Benefit: A celebrity’s preference for a brand gives out a persuasive message - because the celebrity is benefiting from the brand, the consumer will also benefit.
• Demographic Connect: Different stars appeal differently to various demographic segments (age, gender, class, geography etc.).
• Mass Appeal: Some stars have a universal appeal and therefore prove to be a good bet to generate interest among the masses.
• Celebrity endorsement can sometimes compensate for lack of innovative ideas.

It is not just about benefits but also about disadvantages. Here are some:

1. The reputation of the celebrity may derogate after he/she has endorsed the product: Pepsi Cola's suffered with three tarnished celebrities - Mike Tyson, Madonna, and Michael Jackson. Since the behaviour of the celebrities reflects on the brand, celebrity endorsers may at times become liabilities to the brands they endorse.
2. Multi brand endorsements by the same celebrity would lead to overexposure: The novelty of a celebrity endorsement gets diluted if he does too many advertisements. This may be termed as commoditisation of celebrities, who are willing to endorse anything for big bucks. Example, MRF was among the early sponsors of Tendulkar with its logo emblazoned on his bat. But now Tendulkar endorses a myriad brands and the novelty of the Tendulkar-MRF campaign has scaled down.
3. Celebrities endorsing one brand and using another (competitor): Sainsbury’s encountered a problem with Catherina Zeta Jones, whom the company used for its recipe advertisements, when she was caught shopping in Tesco. A similar case happened with Britney Spears who endorsed one cola brand and was repeatedly caught drinking another brand of cola on tape.
4. Mismatch between the celebrity and the image of the brand: Celebrities manifest a certain persona for the audience. It is of paramount importance that there is an egalitarian congruency between the persona of the celebrity and the image of the brand. Each celebrity portrays a broad range of meanings, involving a specific personality and lifestyle. Madonna, for example, is perceived as a tough, intense and modern women associated with the lower middle class. The personality of Pierce Brosnan is best characterized as the perfect gentlemen, whereas Jennifer Aniston has the image of the ‘good girl from next door’.

Despite the obvious economic advantage of using relatively unknown personalities as endorsers in advertising campaigns, the choice of celebrities to fulfill that role has become common practice for brands competing in today's cluttered media environment. There are several reasons for such extensive use of celebrities. Because of their high profile, celebrities may help advertisements stand out from the surrounding clutter, thus improving their communicative ability. Celebrities may also generate extensive PR leverage for brands.  A brief assessment of the current market situation indicates, that celebrity endorsement advertising strategies can, under the right circumstances, indeed justify the high costs associated with this form of advertising.

Collaborations with H&M

Collaboration can be defined as "coming together to work toward a common vision." The collaborative process is intended to move participants away from the traditional definition of power as control or domination and towards a definition that allows for shared authority. This results in greater achievements than would be attained by one organization working alone. (NICIC 2004) 
  
Reasons for collaboration can be different for different company. H&M make collaboration because they will became more popular and increase their profit. For different companies with which H&M collaborated were reasons different. For example Versace decided to collaborate with H&M because 

''I know that with H&M collaboration I am going to reach a much wider audience than usual. When I am going to see young people walking in the street wearing iconic pices, its going to be fun'' (Versace 2011).

One of the most famous collaboration of H&M was with Jimmy Choo. Collection was available in shops in November 2009.

H&M and Jimmy Choo

The collection was focused on nigh out clothes like shoes, evening dresses, handbags and pumps. The range was from £30 to £70 but some dresses were over £100. Designes were much cheaper than genuine Jimmy Choo lines and little bit more expensive then H&M lines but definitely was affordable, H&M 2009.

Jimmy Choo collection for H&M

The full collection is available on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwrsG7siYA0

The collaboration was a big success and it brought other collaboration with Lanvin, Stella McCartney, Sonia Ryckiel....

Versace collaboration

Other famous collaboration of H&M was with Versace, which was released in November 2011. The collection was easy described as fun, colourful, sensual, iconic. Collection had 40 pices for females and 50 for males. The price range was about £100 and definitelly was successful.

Versace collection

''For the collaboration we’ve brought back from the archives as well as from more recent collections, some of the key icons of Versace, such as the bright prints, the Greek key and daring cuts. I can’t wait to see how H&M’s wide audience will make these pieces their own'' (Versace 2011).

 The full collection you can find on the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OsDzhhVLZ8&feature=related

The newest collaboration of H&M company is with David Beckham.

Beckham for H&M

 David Beckham collaboration was lunched in February 2011 and it is focuse on bodywear. Price range is under £10, so very affordable. What is very interesting about this collection is that it has 9 key products and during a year new lines will be added and will be from different textiles, styles, patterns and will go seasonally (H&M 2012).

“The debut of David Beckham Bodywear is a very special moment for us at H&M. It marks the beginning of a new kind of long-term partnership for H&M, one based on quality and excellent design to H&M prices. I am very excited to see how our customers will receive the David Beckham Bodywear collection.”( 
Karl-Johan Persson, CEO of H&M 2012).

Beckham collection

H&M customers expect these collaboratins nowadays and that is the reason why H&M will lunched  collection in March 2012 and this collection will be in collaboration with Marni H&M 2011.

The most powerful fashion magazine

Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast (British Vogue).

cover from 1917

In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States sponsored by Kristoffer Wright. When he died in 1909, Conde Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began growing its publication. He changed it to a bi-weekly magazine and also started Vogue overseas starting in the 1910s. He first went to Britain in 1916, and started a Vogue there (Harvey 1991:17) , then to Spain, and then to Italy and France in 1920, where it was a huge success. The magazine's number of publications and profit increased dramatically under his management.

The current editor-in-chief of American Vogue is Anna Wintour, noted for her trademark bob and her practice of wearing sunglasses indoors. Since taking over in 1988, Wintour has worked to protect the magazine's high status and reputation among fashion publications. In order to do so, she has made the magazine focus on new and more accessible ideas of "fashion" for a wider audience (British Vogue). This allowed Wintour to keep a high circulation while discovering new trends that a broader audience could conceivably afford. For example, the inaugural cover of the magazine under Wintour's editorship featured a three-quarter-length photograph of Israeli super model Michael Bercu wearing a bejeweled Christian Lacroix jacket and a pair of jeans, departing from her predecessors' tendency to portray a woman's face alone, which, according to the Times', gave "greater importance to both her clothing and her body. ''Women are uniquely different, they require separent threatment and instruction'' (Ferguson 1983:190). This image also promoted a new form of chic by combining jeans with haute couture. Wintour's debut cover brokered a class-mass rapprochement that informs modern fashion to this day." Wintour's Vogue also welcomes new and young talent.

So why do we prefer read magazines such as Vouge rather than newspapers? McRobbie 1998: 173 said it clearly. 

Fashion writing is informative or celbratory, it is never critical, only mildly ironical... The editors and journalists rarely break ranks and produce more engaged and challenging writing on this subject.

 However this is not always true. Sometimes are designers not pleased by critic in magazines about their new collection. 

Much easier answer on this question is to learn and to enjoy. (Sacks, R. M. 2009). There is the motivation behind most, if not all, reading adventures. We read to further our knowledge and to enjoy the experience. Sometimes, the learning is forced upon us by a job or by a school, or sometimes it’s just the need for that innate pleasure of discovering something new. Other times, we read solely for pleasure—the pure joy of wandering through a good writer’s brain.

Reading is one of the best indicators of exactly who the human race is. We can’t help ourselves. As a race of beings, we have a fundamental need to know things. We are driven to explore and attempt to understand, whether it is the spiritual whys, or the scientific hows. It has always been that way. It will always be that way.
 

So, the reasons we read magazines are much the same as why we read anything. We read to learn and to enjoy!!!!!