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How Can Celebrities Take Advantage of Their Name to Setup A Retail Brand?

Celebrity entrepreneurship is not a rare phenomenon in the world of business, especially retail business. Many celebrities from around the world from diverse fields and professions went on to test the might of their brand persona as business entrepreneurs; with some coming out with flying colors while many celeb-owned brands having disappeared into the thin air. Although these celebrities do not need any introduction few such popular celebrity entrepreneurs include Oprah Winfrey, Sachin Tendulkar, Jennifer Aniston, Shahrukh Khan, Robert DeNiro, Jessica Alba, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Deepika Padukone and so on. [(1), (2), (3), (4)]

However, coming together of celebrityhood and entrepreneurship does not automatically imply that a celebrity’s business brand will shine at par with his/her professional success. Even celebrity-owned businesses need to work on leveraging their brand name. Some of the key considerations which can prove to be effective in leveraging the brand name of celebrity-owned businesses are highlighted here.

Coming together of celebrityhood and entrepreneurship does not automatically imply that a celebrity’s business brand will shine at par with his/her professional success

Use of Popularity for Brand Recognition 

One of the greatest strength possessed by a celebrity is his/her widespread popularity. And one of the toughest hurdles faced by a business enterprise is getting the attention of its targeted customers for brand recognition. When a celebrity comes up with a brand of his own and promotes it with his visual presence/association with the product, it immediately grabs the attention of the viewers. Clearly, celebrity entrepreneurs have an upper hand over competitors when it comes to achieving brand recognition within a short span of time. Usually, it takes years of toils and efforts for a regular business to get brand recognition in the market.

Celebrity entrepreneurs have an upper hand over competitors when it comes to achieving brand recognition within a short span of time

Brand Acceptance Through Product Performance 

Getting the attention of customers through popularity is one thing; keeping them interested and encouraging them to buy and use the products is quite another. The celeb-role-model thing is almost obsolete now especially when it comes to business. Gone are the days when people used to buy a product just because of its association with or endorsement by a popular celebrity. Customers are smart enough to know that it is not the celebrity they admire but the businessman in the celebrity who is trying to sell his products and services. And this puts everything back to the regular course of customer decision-making process. Even celebrity-owned ventures cannot bypass the basics of business management to achieve brand acceptance and business success which has to be substantiated with rock-solid product performance. 

Even celebrity-owned ventures cannot bypass the basics of business management to achieve brand acceptance and business success which has to be substantiated with rock-solid product performance

Finances to Keep the Brand Floated 

Finance is one such area where most startups struggle with. It is not easy for startups to acquire requisite funds for establishing a business. Celebrities with strong finances can fuel their business investment requirements without bothering about the hassles of attracting investors. While at the same time, with a strong popularity and financial credibility, it is relatively much easier for a celebrity to attract investors and investments. Availability of funds helps ensure that the brand name does not take a beating when business is temporarily down or not going as expected by absorbing losses or by bringing in the necessary small and big changes.

Availability of funds helps ensure that the brand name does not take a beating when business is temporarily down or not going as expected

Avoid Overshadowing

Celebrities may have such a strong image or appeal that they may eclipse the brand itself. This necessitates that the presence of the celebrity is kept to the optimum or balanced out by the co-presence of other stage actors in the advertisements especially in the moving formats. The other means of achieving this include highlighting or stressing more about the products, values and emotions and less on the celebrity.

Celebrities may have such a strong image or appeal that they may eclipse the brand itself

Choosing the Right Business

Psychological affiliation plays a crucial role in the brand positioning of the celeb-owned brands. Every celebrity is associated with a profession in which he/she has made a name. While choosing a business, celebrities must take utmost care to ensure that the chosen business or brand is relatable to their profession if they wish to reap the benefits of quick brand recognition and long-term brand acceptance. For example, a celebrity athlete with startup business of fitness centre/gym stands better chances at eliciting positive response from customers.

While choosing a business, celebrities must take utmost care to ensure that the chosen business or brand is relatable with their profession if they wish to reap the benefits of quick brand recognition and long-term brand acceptance

Use of Social Media 

With widespread popularity and usage of various social media platforms, celebrities enjoy a considerably high degree of fan following. With a single upload, a celebrity can reach out to millions of fans. This is a vanity not granted by customers even to some of the most renowned companies in the world. The sheer numbers speak how vast a target audience a celebrity can reach out to in order to promote their brands.

With a single upload, a celebrity can reach out to millions of fans

Engage Professionals

Coming from a different profession or occupation, business and brand management is a completely different ball game. Brand management has evolved as a separate field of business specialization. The smartest way to effectively manage and leverage brands is by engaging skilled, qualified and experienced professionals.

The smartest way to effectively manage and leverage brands is by engaging skilled, qualified and experienced professionals

Being a celebrity entrepreneur gives a mighty head start from a business perspective. But celebrityhood is not a substitute for brand management. Brand-building is a continuous exercise that involves meticulous execution of carefully chalked out brand promotion activities. However, it is natural for celebrities to have a strong brand leverage emanating from their professional success.

YRC is an “Expert Service Division” of Mind-A-Mend Consultancy Pvt. Ltd.

YRC Related Articles: How to Write SOPs for Marketing?, 6 Ways To Grow Your Business, How to Start a Retail Business in India, Business Expansion Plan for Small Entrepreneurs, Six Steps to Writing a Great SOP for Retail, How to write SOPs for an Apparel Brand?, How to Develop SOPs for Quick Service Restaurant?, How to write SOPs for Furniture Showroom

Author Bio

Rupal Agarwal

Chief Strategy Officer

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    PROCESS AUTOMATION

    The idea of having Ecommerce Consultants on-board from the beginning itself points towards reducing the involvement of the promoters in daily operations. Ecommerce Businesses willing to be a brand reaping profits & sustaining the competition must ensure that most of their processes should be automated. The more the manual intervention, the more would be the errors.

    In Ecommerce business, you get only 1 chance to impress the customer & if you mess up there, you lose the customer for long.

    Process automation in respect to all the activities pertaining to customers from order receiving to order fulfilment is a must for a seamless experience for the customers.

    Task Management is another grey area where most deadlines fail as 90% of the tasks are assigned manually & are forgotten, unheard, misunderstood or mistaken.

    YRC Team of Ecommerce Management Consultants helps to make maximum of the processes system-driven to ensure minimalistic manual intervention.

    VIDEOGRAPHY & PHOTOGRAPHY

    No matter how good your product is, the customer would know only if it looks good.

    Photography includes the following steps:

    • Cataloguing your products
    • Cataloguing your images
    • Backup your images (A few cloud storage solutions include Dropbox, Google Drive, Bitcasa, Apple’s Cloud Storage etc.)
    • Choose the right camera & lens (You may also outsource the photography to a third party agency)

    DIGITAL MARKETING

    Digital Marketing includes SEO & SMM. SEO i.e. Search Engine Optimization includes activities like back-linking, meta tags, blog-writing etc. to ensure your website ranks on the 1st page on Google Search.

    Next comes SMM i.e. “Social Media Marketing” which as the name suggests including promoting your products on all the social media sites, email marketing, influencer marketing & several other BTL activities.

    These activities are going to be recurring & would decide the traffic on the website, the conversions, whether the right target market is tapped, the likes, the views, the orders, the reviews & much more. YRCs Ecommerce Consultants create a budget for digital marketing right from pre-launch to launch & for each month thereafter.

    Building digital marketing strategies in coordination with the agency, selecting them to signing them off would be the role of YRC.

    This ensures seamless coordination, detailed interactions & desired execution as it is always advisable to work with a single agency than multiple of them.

    IT INTEGRATION

    Selection of the right software for smooth functioning of back-end operations right from production to webstore display would be suggested and integrated by YRC Team.

    YRC’s Team defines SOPs of Product Movement, maps it with the locations & people. They then create a blueprint of all the features required in the software & help in shortlisting & selection.

    IT Integration involves connecting your offline inventories with real-time online webstore so when a sale occurs, inventories get deducted real time across offline as well as online platforms.

    This helps in accurate inventory management, maintaining the MOQs, re-order levels & achieving the optimum inventory levels.

    Some popular software include unicommerce, viniculum for your front-end website management & Genisys for your entire back-end Purchase, Production, Accounting, Invoicing etc. management.

    WAREHOUSE & LOGISTICS PLANNING

    • How many cities or countries you wish to sell in?
    • Where should your Warehouse be located?
    • Should you have one warehouse in each country or city?
    • Should you be having your own delivery team in your base city?
    • Would the 3rd party vendors be reliable? What happens when they lose or misplace your product during delivery?
    • How should I manage the logistics if my goods are coming from different countries?
    • How should the goods be stored and barcoded?
    • How much space do I require for warehouse?
    • I am sure several such questions must be haunting you while you think of starting your own fashion ecommerce brand.

     

    At YRC, our warehousing and logistics experts can help you devise a strategy for all of the above mentioned queries and much more.

    We design the layout of the Warehouse considering the inward, goods processing, software entry, barcoding, outward, goods return, scrap storage, goods stacking & much more.

    Logistics route plan is devised considering the manufacturer to your warehouse and from there to last mile delivery locations.

    UI & UX DESIGNING

    This Step involves 03 distinct parts:

    Part 1: Choosing the right Platform:

    From several platforms available in the market right from Shopify to magento, woocommerce, prestoshop, wordpress etc. you must choose the one that fits best for your business

    Part 2: UX Designing:

    “UX” denotes User Experience, which if put in simple language is building the functional requirements of the website.

    UX Designing includes designing the features required in the website, customer journey map, website features, the browsing features, navigation features, ecommerce order management process flow, checkout cart features, catalogue management, ecommerce payment system, cross selling features & much more.

    “As per statistics, 68% of the customers abandon the carts before payment”

    An interesting UX ensures the customer sticks on to the website for a longer time.

    Part 3: UI Designing:

    UI stands for User Interface, which means designing the look and feel of the website. UI includes using the right colours, elements and the entire aesthetics of the website.

    A good User Interface ensures the user completes the task that he has come for. It navigates the user through the journey of the brand in the simplest but most effective way.

    The UX designer maps out the bare bones of the user journey; the UI designer then fills it in with visual and interactive elements.

    If User experience is the bare bone, user interface wraps it up with an attractive cape.

    At YRC, our team if experts can help you develop the entire User Journey to ensure it is engaging!

    SAMPLING & PRODUCTION

    This step follows the “Designing” Phase, whether you have an in-house design team, freelance designers or an outsourced design company. It is one of the most exciting phases, as here you see your designs turning into products & your ideas turning into reality.

    In most start-up cases, production is outsourced i.e. brands tie-up with the established manufacturers/ job-workers to get their products manufactured.

    Sampling involves multiple 04 Stages, Fit-Sample, Prototype Sample, Pre-Production Sample & the Production Sample.

    Prototype Sample is the first sample provided to the buyer. It can be in any fabric/ colour. This sample is just to understand whether the product design looks equally great in reality.

    Fit Sample, as the name suggests is prepared to check the fit of the garment i.e. the various sizes, length, width etc.

    Pre-production is made by the actual production line. Here the stitching quality and other aspects related to manufacturing are checked. This is the last stage where rejection can be accepted.

    Production Sample is made before the production which is the replica of what is going to be finally produced.

    Once you are through with all this, you are good to go ahead & get your goods manufactured.

    PRODUCT DESIGNING / SOURCING

    Product Designing or Sourcing is the heart of the Ecommerce Fashion Brand.

    Product Designing / Sourcing can be done in several ways, as follows:

    • In-house Design Team
    • Freelance Designers
    • Outsourced Design Team
    • Ready Product Sourcing (From Manufacturer or Wholesaler)

    At YRC, we evaluate your business strategy & business model to arrive at the decision, which of the above ways would be best-fit for your business. In certain cases, product sourcing may be a combination of the above.

    These are the people who are going to build your brand! Whether they are the designers or merchandiser, your brand look is going to be in their hands.

    If you are designing each garment from the scratch, the sourcing would play crucial role in developing design identity of your brand.

    Sourcing includes fabric, trims, lining & all the raw material required to build the garment.

    BRANDING

    Branding is the “Look of the Brand”, right from logo to tagline, the colours used, the brand story, the brand communications on social media, the packaging & all the other aspects which speak directly or indirectly to the customers. Branding constitutes the look & feel of the brand & hence must be thoughtfully planned to match with the product that we are selling.

    Branding must appeal to our target audience. Example : A golden colour logo depicting finesse, art, richness, premium, however beautiful it may be individually cannot go with a brand selling affordable kids wear products. So, your logo must be in-line with your brand positioning, whether you are an expensive brand or a luxury brand or a value for money brand, it must be depicted from your “Branding”.

    It is an integral part to attract the target audience.

    ORGANOGRAMS & SOP’s

    Organogram is the “HR Blueprint” of the business which is created at the onset, to map out the team required across each function at various stages of the business. At the launch, only key people need to be got on board to ensure the project gets started & at this stage, all of them need to multi-task. Similarly, certain financial as well as operational goals are set for addition of the further team. Example, for the operations team, we hire 1 operations manager during the pre-launch phase & we add 1 more only when the business kicks-off & we reach a volume of selling more than 1000 pcs/ month or a turnover of more than 0.1 million USD.

    SOPs are Standard Operating Procedures, a bible to run the entire organization right from Sales, Purchase, HR, Order receiving to Order fulfilment, Inventory Management, Accounts, Warehouse, Logistics, Supply Chain, Production & all the other relevant functions for the business. Business must be organized from its first day of operations; only then the tasks can be delegated.

    At YRC, we design the organization structure, the processes, and approximate time taken to execute each process, job profile of every member within the organization, their KRAs, KPIs & the Reporting Structure.

    CRITICAL PATHWAY

    Critical Pathway Analysis (CPA), is a project management technique which cannot be overlooked while launching an ecommerce fashion brand. Brand launch process is cumbersome with multiple inter-dependent & time-bound tasks involved, which need to be tracked to ensure the project remains on track.

    CPA outlines key tasks across the project, their turnaround time (TAT) & the dependencies of tasks upon each other. It identifies the sequence of tasks, their interdependent steps from inception to completion, their criticalities, and their dates of onset, target dates of completion along with the key responsible person for the respective activities. Critical Pathway helps in understanding the unimportant & not urgent tasks which may jeopardize the execution of the project because of an unexpected snag! It also maps out the potential bottlenecks which might be posed because of the dependencies of tasks upon each other & cases where the next task cannot be commenced before the completion of the previous one.

    CPA detects the minimum & the maximum time involvement of a particular individual or team to execute the task, thereby arriving at the overall deadlines associated with the project.

    At Your Retail Coach, we design the Critical Pathway & review it periodically to ensure the project is on track & the progress is measurable.

    BUSINESS STRATEGY & BUSINESS PLAN

    Business Strategy includes the vision, mission, goals, business model, business plan & strategy for all the functions within the organization.

    Business Strategy is a well-defined plan that outlines who, what, where, why, how & when for the company; for example, who would be the target market, how to attract the target audience, when to launch new products, where to operate from, how to handle competitors, what would be the USP, what would be long term goal of the organization & several other answers to the 5Ws of Strategy.

    Business Strategy aligns the organization towards a common goal. Business SWOT helps company to identify & overcome their weaknesses & focus to sharpen the strengths. Business strategy forecasts future risks and helps business in building skillsets to overcome the potential threats.

    YRC’s Business Plan focuses on creating a “Blueprint” of the business, thereby deriving the feasibility of the concept & gauge whether the opportunity is lucrative to invest time, energy & effort. Business Plan creates cash flow understanding i.e. building inflow & outflow cash projections from Week zero to week 60 i.e. 05 year projection. Business Plan calculates the capital investment, operating costs, one-time costs, recurring costs & all the other numbers relevant to obtain the breakeven sales, return on investment, return on capital, internal rate of return & several other ratios. Business Plan is also one of the important requirements if you are targeting the “Investor Route”. Fund raising becomes extremely transparent & channelized. With business plan panned out clearly, the business will know until what point must it be stretched & where to stop, which reduces the probability of unplanned investments.

    MARKET RESEARCH

    Starting the concept of Ecommerce Fashion brand with Market Research ensures we get detailed understanding of the industry & this research report also acts as a social confirmation for your concept. Market Research helps in understanding the target locations, their population, potential online buyers for your product, competitors for each category, and top selling products of the competitors, competitors’ price range, offers & their responses & much more. Market Research helps in thorough understanding of your brand position as compared to our competitors. It helps in identifying gaps in the market, in your category along with the scope of the said product in the desired market. This will help in validation of your concept & prevents you from making the same mistakes as your fellow brands, eventually saving your time, energy & efforts. This phase is also a make or a break phase, as the market research study may at-times come up with some eye-popping numbers & statistics which might compel you to re-think on your product or category that you are planning to sell or alter your entire concept itself!! Market Research Reports analyse the competitors’ webstore for their traffic, conversion & sales. This is extremely valuable information to derive our inventory budgets & projections, which takes us to our next phase.