Will Lionel Messi be able to score a goal for Tata Motors?

Celebrities have been endorsing everything from an underwear to a car, all over the world. They could be film stars, sports personalities including footballers, boxers, cricketers, sprinters, rugby players, golf champions or even chess masters. There is no denying the fact that celebrities do manage to pull a crowd towards a particular brand they are endorsing. That is just about all that they manage to achieve. Beyond that, it’s the brand’s intrinsic value that comes to play. With or without a Sachin Tendulkar, a BMW car will do well, if it has to. An Akshay Kumar can entice a customer to the doorstep of a Honda Motorcycle store. But then the product has to be good for the customer to eventually buy a motorcycle.

Automobiles are different from Maggi noodles and salted chips. Vehicles have to be well engineered , well styled and well priced for it to have takers among the general public. At Tata Motors a lot of these have been missing for a very long time. Bringing in a Messi will not ignite sales of Tata vehicles. Yes, a Dhanteras festival can push sales, albeit momentarily. But for a product to sustain for a longer period its mandatory that it is smartly engineered, well styled and rightly priced for the customers to come flocking to the store.

No matter how many likes you have on facebook or how many followers you have on twitter or how many views you have on youtube, the fact of the matter is that, all these have nothing to do with sales of a vehicle. On the one hand while celebrity endorsements have failed miserably for car makers, on the other hand, social media sites failed in pushing sales.  If you take all the celebrities out and block every social media site across the globe, a vehicle can do well on the sales front if it has been engineered, styled and priced right.

Figures as per SIAM (2015)