BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Four Important Steps To Align Celebrities With Your Startup Brand

This article is more than 9 years old.

By Arian Radmand 

It goes without saying that having a well-known celebrity endorse your brand or product can do wonders for a startup. The problem, however, is getting celebrities to give you the time of day.

Recently, we’ve been lucky enough to have a number of high-profile celebrities (especially celebrity athletes) join us in our quest to build the world’s largest private coaching service. We’ve learned quite a bit about aligning celebrities with our brand as well as how to get them to join, and we’d like to share our tips with you.

1. Start with your brand.

Who are you? What is your mission? What problem are you trying to solve? Before looking outward to see what type of celebrities you want associated with your company, you really need to be clear about your own brand. Start by really defining how you want to represent your company to the world.

This is important to understand so that you can make an educated decision as to which celebrities are best suited to amplify your brand. Asking the wrong celebrity to represent your company can be costly and end up damaging your brand in the future, instead of helping it.

2. Look for people who embody your brand.

After you’ve defined your brand, it will be much easier to identify a short list of celebrities who fit in best with your mission. Remember, you cannot change how celebrities act and behave, so your only option is to look for celebs who already embody your brand.

Everyone has different personalities, and every celebrity has his or her own story. The best types of athletes/celebrities to get on board are people who have passion for your industry or really believe in your company. Passion is your biggest tool -- you can’t fake it. If a celebrity is passionate about your business, not only will you have an easy time convincing them to join, but they will be much more likely to embrace the partnership and work with you to amplify your message.

This brings us to our next challenge:

3. Use your connections to access to celebrities/high-profile athletes.

Leverage your connections! Remember, celebrities are busy and difficult to pin down. However, the good news is that most of the time you will be dealing directly with their agent or representative and those people are easy to reach (it’s their job, after all).

We recommend treating agents just as you would treat potential investors. Assume they know nothing about your business and really sell them on your product or service. You should put together a pitch deck that is tailored specifically to that athlete or celebrity, explaining exactly why the partnership makes sense. This is really the place to put the effort in and go the extra mile. You cannot cut corners here by just sending along a generic pitch and hoping for the best.

The next thing you need to do is get warm introductions to the agents. This is a great time to leverage your existing investors and advisors.

This is also why it’s so important to carefully select your investors. Money is a commodity -- you can take it from anywhere. Make sure you choose investors who care about your business and can really help you move forward when you need it the most. This is a great example of one such time. If you don’t have any investors or advisors who are able to help you in this scenario, then I would strongly suggest finding some. It will make your life much easier down the line.

4. Develop a plan for leveraging the relationship.

After you’ve landed a celebrity endorser, your job is far from over. In fact, this is where the real work begins. You’ve just spent a great deal of time and effort to get a celebrity to join you. Now, it’s up to you to do the work for them!

Celebrities are busy. They have limited attention span, are constantly on the move, and are highly sought after. That means it’s up to you to truly cultivate and leverage every high-profile relationship you create. Before taking on any celebrity endorsers, always have an internal plan describing how you’re going to get the most out of the relationship. Ideally, someone within your organization will be the liaison and stay on top of the celebrities’ schedule, contact them when necessary, and keep them up to date about your organization before they have interviews so that your company is always top of mind. This is often an overlooked aspect of leveraging the power of celebrity endorsers, but in my opinion is the most important.

Recently, there have been a number of companies that have sprung up with the sole purpose of connecting people with celebrities. Has anyone tried going through these channels to gain access to celebrities? If so, I would love to hear about it!

Arian Radmand is the Co-Founder & Director of Engineering of CoachUp.com - a service that connects athletes with private coaches.