Celebrity couples sparkle for brands

Virat-Anushka (Virushka) featured together in the Google Duo ad last week, their second advertising outing together after they became man and wife. Their first campaign together was for Manyavar, just a few weeks before they tied the knot a year ago.
 
Deepika-Ranveer (Deepveer) too debuted together in an ad for Lloyd air-conditioners last month. They have done movies together in the past but this was their maiden effort for brand endorsement together. Akshay-Twinkle have been featuring together in ads too, the most recent one being for Fortune basmati rice. Saif-Kareena (Saifeena) have been featured together by AirBnB and Abhishek-Aishwarya (Abhiash) have jointly endorsed TTK Prestige pressure cookers.

 
The rise of couple celebrity brands begets two questions: first, are celebrity couples saleable just because they are married? Second, are individual partners singly more powerful as brands than the couples together?
 

To answer the first question about marriage as the USP, let us go down memory lane to see why celebrity couples in India never really caught public fancy and, therefore, did not get to do brand endorsements together.
 
When Dilip Kumar married Saira Banu, Yusuf Saheb’s career was well neigh over and Saira really wasn’t an ‘A’ grader. Sunil Dutt and Nargis could have been a genuine power couple but then Nargis just renounced the movies after they married. Rajesh Khanna was India’s first superstar and Dimple Kapadia was the darling of the nation after the success of Bobby but the marriage itself 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.

 
When Indian cinema’s heart-throb Sharmila Tagore married the Indian cricket 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 those times.  But by the time the two were married in 1969, Pataudi had started to fade out from cricket and the couple preferred to remain low-profile post marriage. Dharmendra and Hema Malini were hardly ever seen together in public as a couple. 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.

 
In cricket, Sunil Gavaskar and wife Marshneil were pretty well known together as a couple, when he was at his peak in the 70s. But she had no independent credentials, and did not really add to her husband’s persona as one of India’s finest cricketers. Sachin and his wife Anjali could have been cricket’s original first couple, but Anjali preferred to keep her head down despite her own independent credentials as a doctor. Mohd Azharuddin and Sangeeta Bijlani did hit the upper circuits for a while as a couple but his getting mired in the match-fixing controversy killed any possibilities of their becoming an aspirational power couple. Dhoni and his wife Sakshi are part of Colgate’s latest version of Andar se Strong campaign, but Sakshi is hardly known.

 
Harbhajan Singh and his actress wife Geeta Basra, Yuvraj Singh-Hazel Keech, Zaheer Khan-Sagarika Ghatge, Stuart Binny-Mayanti Langer, Dinesh Karthik-Dipika Pallikal, Sania Mirza-Shoaib Malik, Jyoti Randhawa-Chitrangada Singh, Mahesh Bhupati-Lara Dutta and Leander Paes-Rhea Pillai are all good for Page 3 but fall short of the fame threshold, and therefore cashable commercial value together.
 
So, famous couples need more than just matrimony to sell brands. They require togetherness, that too visible and enduring happiness together, that makes them aspirational, trustworthy, respected, and worth emulating as a couple. Choices so far have been limited.
Recent research by the Indian Institute of Human Brands (IIHB) shows that for a couple brand to succeed today:

1) at least one of the two must be in top form
2) both must independently be respected
3) be seen to be successful
4) be buzzy.
Amongst the current choice sets, Virat drives the Virushka brand with his performance. Anushka adds the oomph. Akshay is a winner-all-the-way while
Mrs Funnybones provides class and charisma. In Deepveer both partners are equally strong and individually no. 1. Unfortunately for Abhiash and Saifeena neither couple is a top leaguer.
 
Going forward Virushka, Deepveer, and Akshay-Twinkle are all well poised to break the celebrity couple jinx of the past many decades. If Ranbir-Alia decide to tie the knot, they too will join this August league of made in heaven alliances to sell brands with their sparkle and sizzle. The era of the Celebrity Couple, methinks, is finally here.

The writer is an advertising and media veteran
sandeep@goyalmail.com