A Report on Star Couples by the Indian Institute of Human Brands How Do You Define a Power Couple?
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TheThe SparklersSparklers A report on star couples by the Indian Institute of Human Brands How do you define a power couple? This report on couple brands addresses the issue across multiple facets ndia as a society was late in discovering It is a no-brainer that the stakes in the power of its couples. But when it choosing the right brand ambassador were Icame under the spotlight, the term was never much higher. If you are among the on steroids with many vying for the title. marketers who’s choosing multiple brand Four years back, there was even a ambassadors, or star couples, then there reality TV show in India by the same is inadequate research to convincingly name. That many of the participants in know if you have put your money on the that show would only fit into the league right set of ambassadors. of ‘wannabe’ power couples, is a different It’s this yawning gap that The Sparklers matter altogether. report aims to address. There have been innumerable blogs This report on couple brands addresses and articles on how to spot the early the issue across multiple facets. Who are signs of the blooming of power couples. the most powerful couple brands in India? However, power couples as a term, is now Are they the usual suspects? Are there any adequately commoditized. hidden surprises? When you choose a star Hence, we at couple, do they pack double the punch? the Mumbai- And if they fail, does your brand stand to based Indian lose twice as much? Institute The report calibrates India’s most of Human recalled ‘The Sparklers’ over multiple Brands (IIHB), attributes covering Image, Personality spearheaded and Human factors. In the pages that by advertising follow we trace the evolution of The veteran Dr. Sparklers in India. Who gets the maximum Sandeep endorsements? Who figures higher in Goyal, who our trademarked scoring patterns? And has published if there’s any uncertainty, whether your his thesis on the subject, ‘Celebrities as brand has made the right choice of Human Brands’ , chose to refer to this celebrity couple, by the time you finish shining set of celebrated couples as The reading the next few pages, we would Sparklers. have hopefully put many of your doubts Our inaugural report on The Sparklers to rest. focuses on the aspect of getting maximum May the glitter of The Sparklers rub off return on your marketing dollar by on your brands as well! choosing the right power couple for your brand. —Editor 2 t was during the FIFA World Cup 2006 that David Beckham and The IVictoria Caroline Adams also known as Posh Spice, were a toast of the celebrity circuit. With media coverage of the World Cup including the wives Sparklers and girlfriends (WAGS, as it was called) of the stars, David and Victoria Beckham became the original power couple for that could Indian celebrities to take cues from. Bollywood could actually have given India its own power couple(s) way way back in the 1960/1970s but the couples have been … somehow did not have the sustaining power. When Dilip Kumar married If we trace the evolution of Saira Banu, they could have been the power couples, strangely the first amongst India’s power couples. But Dilip Kumar’s career was by then concept came into Indian almost over and Saira really wasn’t conscience through the medium of sports (not Bol- lywood as many would want to believe). And it was not through cricket, a sport that’s heavily followed in India, but its lesser cousin, soccer. 3 an ‘A’ grader in her own independent right. Sunil Dutt and Nargis could have been a genuine power couple but then Nargis just renounced the movies after she married; and Sunil Dutt became an actor of repute, and then a respected politician only much later. Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia could have worn the power couple crown in 1973, but their marriage was not a very successful or enduring one. When Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri tied the knot, Jaya was actually the better-known half of the couple. As Amitabh carved a dominant position in Indian cinema, Jaya however faded into domesticity, never letting the power couple tag become a reality. When Indian cinema’s heart-throb Sharmila Tagore married the Indian captain Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, they together had just the right credentials to become a power couple: he was a right royal Nawab, and the youngest ever captain of the Indian cricket team and she was the first actress to have posed in a bikini, breaking the taboos of that time. But by the time the two were married in 1969, Pataudi had started to fade out from cricket. Also, as a couple, the two were very low- profile, preferring to stay away from the glare especially once Sharmila quit the movies for motherhood, and more. The marriage of Dharmendra and Hema Malini could have given us a genuine power couple but post marriage they were hardly seen together in public. Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh were young, buzzy, successful and popular when they got married: all the right ingredients for a power alliance but the marriage was very rocky in the initial years, never allowing them to build a public profile of togetherness. Rishi’s brother Randhir Kapoor too married actress Babita but frankly both of them were ‘B’ listers and in any case their marriage too kind of went bust over time. So no luck there. 4 Back to cricket. Thirteen years down the line, today in 2019, most Indian sports stars have their work cut out. According to researchers at the London School of Marketing, Cricket tops the list of sports that are most dependent on endorsements at 81 per cent. Tennis at 78 per cent and Golf at 75 per cent follow closely. While Indian sports stars While Dhoni and might be great as individual performers, how well do they his wife Sakshi have perform as a team (in this case, the team consists only of been a part of Colgate’s their better half ). Cricket is beset with enough and more examples of those latest version of Andar who did come with some promise of shine, but did not Se Strong campaign, it quite sparkle. certainly does not take Sunil Gavaskar and wife Marshneil were pretty well them any higher on the known together as a couple when he was at his peak in the pecking order 70s. But she had no independent credentials, and did not really add to his persona as one of India’s finest cricketers. While MS Dhoni topped the charts in the endorsement 5 Or even take the ‘God’ of cricket, Sachin Tendulkar. Sachin and his wife Anjali could have been Cricket’s original first couple, but Anjali did not quite break into the league despite her own independ- ent credentials as a doctor. earnings for many years, one cannot say that the better Singh, her career in films did not quite ever take off. halves of Indian cricketers (with Virushka being one strong Something similar could be said about Hazel Keech who exception) added to their brand power in any ways. married Yuvraj Singh and later adopted the name of While Dhoni and his wife Sakshi have been a part of Gurbasant Kaur. Or take the case of Sagarika Ghatge who Colgate’s latest version of Andar Se Strong campaign, it married Zaheer Khan. Sagarika’s first film Chak De India certainly does not take them any higher on the pecking was a landmark hit and did give her an extended stay under order of ‘The Sparklers’. In fact, the role played by Sakshi the spotlight. However, she has not been able to exude the could even be responsible for taking some sparkle away staying power as a sparkler in her subsequent films. from MS Dhoni in cases like the Amrapali group. Again Stuart Binny and his wife Mayanti Langer could be In March 2019, Dhoni sued the promoters of real estate a celebrity couple with some gloss, but not enough sparkle. group Amrapali for non-payment of brand endorsement Same applies to Dinesh Karthik and his squash-champion fees. However, in the Amrapali case, Dhoni’s involvement wife, Dipika Pallikal. Just not well known enough together. with the disgraced builder was not merely that of a brand The other couple who showed a lot of promise but ambassador, much as he may have claimed in media fizzled out are Sania Mirza and her husband cricketer as part of his innocence act. Dhoni’s wife Sakshi was a Shoaib Malik. Their sparkling status is restricted largely director at Amrapali Mahi Developers Private Limited and to Pakistan where an endorsement for Nestle Everyday this firm was involved in running a hospital and a charity in won them a lot of mind-space. But their appeal in India Dhoni’s home state Jharkhand. Sakshi remained a director remains limited. of this entity well after Dhoni quit as Amrapali’s brand Among other sports one power couple that could have ambassador. been sparkling are Golfer Jyoti Randhawa and his actor Mohd Azharuddin and Sangeeta Bijlani did hit the upper wife Chitrangada Singh. Again, a lack of sustained success circuits for a while as a couple but his getting mired in the in their respective fields is their undoing. And they are no match-fixing controversy killed any possibilities of their longer together any way. Much the same story applies to becoming an aspirational power couple. Mahesh Bhupati-Lara Dutta and Leander Paes-Rhea Pillai Another possibility for becoming a power couple could … a bit of social buzz but no staying power.