Brand endorsement can provide a highly effective means to enhance a brand’s visibility, shape perceptions towards the brand and anchor its credibility. This is very true in the MENA region as elsewhere especially as in today’s digital era product branding and messaging is increasingly being determined and managed in the realm of the consumer not the producer and the brand conversation has largely moved to the public sphere. Successful brand ambassadors (or brand advocates or promotional models or goodwill ambassadors as they are sometimes referred to) champion a brand and actively spread the brand message in a key target market and can constitute a highly effective extension of a professional marketer’s brand arsenal. They can increase brand awareness and also influence perceptions towards the brand and shape brand associations. Companies can enlist full-time or part-time professional brand ambassadors and often we see famous celebrities in these spots in the MENA; and/or companies can espouse simpler methods of eliciting brand endorsements such as customer testimonials which are extremely effective as they are seen as sincere feedback and an accurate reflection of the brand’s qualities.
Actually I'm currently working as a consultant on a specific Brand Endorsement deal between a well-known manufacturer of electrical equipment and a local company in Iran called SanazSania which was built around an Iranian Celebrity Chef who now owns a Magazine, a Cooking Academy, appears regularly in TV shows and has written several cook books. This company is preparing to launch a range of electrical kitchen accessories into the market so you can imagine why they would be interested in this deal. We prepared a proposal on behalf of SanazSania for them and gave them over 20 different solutions on how we could take advantage of SanazSania's connection to their target market and are now in the process of finalizing the terms.
The crucial point in relation to brand endorsement in middle-east in my opinion is the fact that people in this region are more emotional and because of their high emotions they also need emotional triggers to guarantee endorsement success, and hence designing these triggers remains the most strategic part of any endorsement deal in the middle-east.
