The Indian and Royal Challengers Bangalore skipper Virat Kohli is one of the preferred brand faces in India. Over the years, he has been leading the list of most preferred faces for brand endorsement. However, as per research of the Indian Institute of Human Brands (IIHB), which was conducted 10 days after the start of the IPL 2021, Virat Kohli isn’t the leading brand endorser in the IPL.
Well, to conduct the survey, the IIHB team used its proprietorial CELEBAR tool, which is based on Celebrity Brand Association & Recognition to assign a metric score to each celebrity and associated brand.
As per the CELEBAR tool, MS Dhoni had a score of 87. The report revealed: “Dhoni’s spontaneous recall was an unusually high 82%. His association with Dream 11 was also very constant at 79% from the last edition. He got 9% association with IPL/Star TV, 8% brand association with Indigo Paints, 6% with Orient Fans for Orient Fans and Livfast Solar. 2% recall came from SunFeast Yippee. So, most of Dhoni’s brand goodness got hijacked by Dream 11, much like last year,”
With a CELEBAR score of 87, MS Dhoni is the leading endorser in the IPL this year. Following him is Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh, who achieved a score of 86. However, Ranveer’s association was majorly spread with Jio Fiber at 56%, JD mart at 48%, My11Circle at 22%, and Bingo at 18%.
On the other hand, Virat Kohli is far behind in the list with the CELEBAR score of only 45, which is mostly derived by his 94% association with MRF tyres.
Interestingly, there were very few or no ads with Deepika Padukone, Akshay Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, Ranbir Kapoor, and cricketers Rohit Sharma or KL Rahul or Hardik Pandya. “…media weightages behind those ads were too insignificant to be noticed by viewers. In the case of the cricketers association with endorsed brands was invariably mistaken,” it noted.
The Cred ad for Rahul Dravid was spontaneously recalled by 17% of respondents however, not many remembered other celebrities in the advertisements of the same brand.
