Are you using celebrity endorsements to boost your sales?

A new ad campign with celebrity endorsement launched here in Australia last night. Hollywood star Al Pacino fronted the new campaign for Australian-owned coffee brand Vittoria which premiered during the broadcast of MasterChef.

My clients and closest friends will know I didn’t get to see it as I don’t watch television, however the marketer in me was fascinated to hear about the new ad and the use of a celebrity to endorse a product. It’s claimed this is the first time that Pacino, star of films such as The Godfather and Scarface, has agreed to endorse a product.

Vittoria is a 100% family owned Australian company, set up by two Sicilian brothers in 1947 who saw an opportunity for Italian food and beverage products in Australia. The ads were filmed in New York City in May, and aired for the first time in Australia last night.

Les Schirato, CEO of Vittoria Coffee, said: “We’re incredibly proud and honoured that Al Pacino has agreed to star in a commercial for Vittoria. What’s even more incredible is this is the first time the star of Godfather, Scent of a Woman and Scarface has agreed to endorse a product. The fact that Pacino is from an Italian migrant background – just like our family –makes him feel like a true ambassador for our brand.”

Levinson joined the project at the suggestion of Pacino, who worked with the director on the television drama You Don’t Know Jack, which recently aired in the United States.

“We are proud that as an Australian business, Vittoria coffee has been able to secure one of the world’s leading stars to endorse our brand,” added Schirato.

It isn’t the first time an Australian brand has used an American star to front its advertising. Recently the Greater Building Society surprised everyone with its deal for comedic star Jerry Seinfeld to front its ads.

In our celebrity-obsessed world, getting a celebrity to speak for a product or service is seen as an effective advertising method. But I want to encourage all business owners, before they search for a celebrity of their own to consider a few things.

Sure, it’s great to get a celeb to speak on you/ your product or company’s behalf, but the best method of advertising a product or service is the product or service itself. If your goods are good, they will sell themselves. In the career market - if you are good, your skills and expertise will sell itself.

How many times in your life have you used a product solely because of a celebrity endorsement?

Also you need to be realistic - unless you’re cashed up with lots of money you’re just not getting the big “A-List” stars. So what can you do? Try local celebrities like radio DJs. Many local radio personalities are expected to advertise for a certain number of sponsors.

Bus most importantly have an excellent product first. Remember, when a celebrity speaks on your behalf, you’re putting their reputation out there as well as your own. In the case of your career and having someone be your referree you want to be sure they are 100% happy to endorse you and will say only great things!

Heidi Alexandra Pollard - The Living Leaders Advocate

To your success

Great Leaders Focus on Solutions

Today’s leaders are faced with problem solving opportunities every day - what sets apart average managers from great leaders is the way that they approach them.
So what are the habits, practices and actions these leaders take to become expert solution finders? The number one powerful habit that leaders have is reading.

Managers generally focus wholeheartedly on the problem, acknowledging, worrying over and discussing the problem to themselves and with others.

Great leaders on the other hand, don’t draw attention to problems. They focus on solutions. They express their trust in a vision or plan and they do all that they can to harness the support of the people around them towards the positive goal.

The ability to lead groups of people through change and challenge is rapidly becoming a core requirement of successful leadership. Research on leadership development has shown that leadership is not simply an innate ability of extraordinary people, but is actually the repeated combination of habits, practices and actions ordinary people take to inspire groups of people to achieve extraordinary things.

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders must be readers. Harry S Truman

Reading offers the chance to see the world from someone else’s eyes, thus broadening the leader’s mind to other points of view and new possibilities. It is also a great imagination trigger and helps increase creativity.

There is so much knowledge available in the world, why would you try to invent solutions to problems without finding out what others already know? If you ever find yourself stuck for a new idea for a project or have come across a barrier that seems impossible to overcome, all you need to do is read. You may not find the exact answer you are looking for but the very act of reading will open your mind up, improve your concentration and creativity, allows new ideas to come and solutions to show themselves. 

Of all the things we can do to improve ourselves and our leadership, reading would have to be the most powerful and inexpensive. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies read an average of four to five books a month.

The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go. Dr. Seuss

Reading for just 15 minutes a day, every day for one year can add up to 20 books a year - enough to become an expert in your field. So what are you waiting for? Turn off the television and go read a book.

To your brilliance

Heidi Alexandra Pollard

Get more social to boost your career

I guarantee almost everyone has done some level of ego-surfing and googled their name to see what comes up. While it may sound like a trip down vanity lane googling yourself on a semi regular basis is a great way to track and measure your professional online presence.

Using quotation marks around your name eg: “Sarah Smith” is the cleanest form of searching and will ensure you just get results for your own name (as well as any others with the same name)

It’s a great way to track and measure your presence as well as get a feel for the topics and themes associated with you on the web. Why? Because I guarantee you many prospective employers these days are googling applicants names to confirm resume claims and get a feel for what others say about them as well as what they get up to on the weekend! Sound scary?

With Facebook leading the way and Twitter activity on the rise, Australians are rapidly increasing their participation in social media, content sharing and personal brand building. A recent study showed nearly four in five of Australia’s nine million social media users sent or shared a photo in the past year and nearly three quarters shared a link. The biggest increases in social media usage were reading and posting on Twitter and reading wikis.

Twitter’s audience levels grew by more than 400% in 2009 so if you’ve got something to say, that’s the space!

“The opportunities for brands and companies to tap into the social media phenomenon are really just beginning to emerge and to date we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg,” states Melanie Ingrey, Research Director for Nielsen’s online business.

Your personal brand is the most valuable asset you have - what are you doing to build your brand online?

Yours in prosperity

Heidi Alexandra Pollard
The Communicator’s Coach

Results not resolutions

With the new decade upon us, now is the time to review, renew and reignite your plans for what you want the next year to hold in store.

So how can you create results and not just empty resolutions? Simple. Treat the new year as you would any other project and begin with the end in mind.Take a moment to sit quietly and visualize yourself one year from now. What do you want to have accomplished? Who do you want to have become in the process? What kind of relationships do you want have? What kind of experiences will you have had by the end of 2010? 

Allow your mind to paint the picture as vividly as you can - in words, pictures, sounds or feelings - whatever makes it feel most real for you. This will engage your subconscious mind, which is the best way to achieve successful results. 

Write down your visualisation in the form of a letter or story, as accomplishments that have already happened. Doing so will trick your subconscious mind into believing this to be true and it will work for you day and night to make your vision match your reality. 

Another major step to ensure results is the act of writing your vision down and sharing it with others. Doing so propels your subconscious mind make the commitment to reach them. 

My secret weapon to ensure my goals are powerful is to write them in the form of a gratitude letter. As my coaching clients can attest, a key success principle I teach is ‘ink it, don’t just think it’. As an author and teacher I find the narrative form to be very instructive and inspiring as it makes it feel so tangible.

If you are a practical, list writer then you may prefer to use an action plan approach to defining your year ahead. Use quarterly or six month milestones and dot points outlining what you will be do and have at each project milestone along the way.Either way, what matters is that you engage in the process of projecting your future possibility and capturing it on paper. This will give you clarity and focus. 

Working backwards with the beginning in mind will ensure you don’t set yourself up for failure. Many people overestimate what they can achieve when setting goals and end up with so many that they would have to work 20 hours a day, exercise for five hours a day and save 90 per cent of their earnings. Impossible!

This year instead of worrying about resolutions, focus on the evidence of the results you will have achieved by this time next year. And most of all remember, real success is not about having it all, its about being, doing and having those things that matter!

Yours in prosperity, passion and purpose

Heidi Alexandra Pollard
The Communicator’s Coach