WE'RE OVER CELEBRITY BRANDS
Unpopular Reality Check: We are all over celebrity brands.
Are we at the end of the celebrity brand era?
‘No’ you cry! We know. Marketing-wise celebrity brands are popular/fun/ritzy/clever/at the very least, deeply intriguing. They can explode growth and growth is hard to do organically these days (though ultimately critical to your success).
But there are fissures and fatigue on the horizon. It’s making us come face to face with how much collab fatigue is upon us. Perhaps the shiny penny of celebrity-as-founder is starting to fade.
What fissures, you say?
Recently one of our faves Feed Me by Emily Sundberg reported on the popularity of brand incubators and their recent woes:
“In January, Forma Brands, the incubator behind Ariana Grande’s R.E.M. Beauty and influencer-favourite makeup brand Morphe, filed for bankruptcy following several unfruitful tie-ups with influencers like James Charles and Emma Chamberlain. Now, it’s facing accusations from Shelby Wild, the founder of Forma-owned hair care label Playa, that the company didn’t inadequately support Playa after it was acquired in 2020. Incubator-created, influencer-fronted brands like TikTokker Addison Rae’s Item Beauty, which was built by the incubator Madeby Collective, was initially envisioned as a seamless way to translate her large online audiences to sales. But shortly after it debuted in 2021, Item Beauty was pulled from shelves, further showing the vulnerabilities of the influencer-incubator model. The market is undergoing a bit of a course correction after it was saturated with celebrity and influencer brands, said Daniel Landver, chief executive of Digital Brand Products, a branch of UTA-owned Digital Brand Architects, which helps influencers broker product deals and partnerships. His team is focused on doing fewer, but better deals.”
Yikes.
Then we read this from Snaxshot:
“Speaking of spirits —this month has also been an reluctant witness to the launch of various celebrity gin brands…these cringe celebrity brands have more of an advantage of being able to grow reputation even when they’ve diluted their brand equity…Regardless of where you stand on this —can we agree we should have a moratorium on celebrities launching brands in general, for fuck’s sake!”
Ooof.
And the nail in the coffin from Logged Off’s Rachel Karten:
When three women with their pulse on culture, food and social tell you the same thing, warning bells should be ringing.
And yet we continue to see celebrity brands emerging.
Millie Bobby Brown launches her coffee line, (that is getting laughs for looking like a box of tampons—oy)
And Michelle Obama?!
We don’t see the end of this anytime soon despite consumer fatigue because marketers? Entrepreneurs? Venture start-uppers? want the easy way out. The harder route of growing incrementally is not appealing.
So why do it? Why even build a brand if it’s not backed by the former First Lady or the internet darling du jour?
The reality is that building a brand is hard work.
You can put a pretty face on it but if the product sucks or there’s no substance to it people will call bullshit. It will have been hundreds of thousands spent and time lost without any real impactful results.
Even hard-punching celeb-backed brands quickly faded into obscurity. See the Kardashian ATM Kard and Blake Lively’s Preserve project. It’s not to say it can’t be done well (see; Rhode, SKIMS, Fenty, Pattern Beauty, etc), it’s just that celebrity cannot be the only ingredient to success—for celebrity brands to work they still need to be great brands.
“For celebrity brands to work they still need to be great brands.”
Brands are founded because of great ideas.
Use that like fuel to a fire. Add in the hard work of proper positioning, true differentiation and really fucking compelling messaging and you might just lay claim to your own slice of success.
So the question is: do you want to put in the hard work? You can either do it before or after the contract is signed but either way, it can’t be delayed forever.