Last night on an episode of Channel 4’s hard-hitting social documentary Come Dine with Me, a young lady uttered the following profundity: “You know, I would really love it if Cheryl Cole brought out a perfume.”
This struck me as an unusually frank admission by a consumer that the quality of the product is not only secondary but irrelevant compared with the value of the celebrity endorsement.
Have we then reached the stage where a celebrity is no longer used as an excuse to sell pieces of merchandise, but where merchandise is used as an excuse to sell pieces of a celebrity?
Or is it only certain celebrities? And is it a new thing or has the Relic element always been there at the extreme end of the fame and tat-flogging business?
9 comments:
I've been campaigning for Bobby Davro to release a signature scent for years, and all to no avail.
which was the more famous product - brut aftershave, Henry Cooper, or the abstract idea of Henry Cooper advertising brut aftershave?
Speechless. This is so far beyond my understanding, I really wouldn't know where to begin.
Yes, the more you look at the girl's statement, the weirder it gets.
Isn't there a scene from one of Trollope's novels where a dainty young thing named Eliza Middlemuchmarch confesses to a her cousin in the drawing room that she dreams of the handsome young vicar coming out with a product called Dr. Appleby's Health Tonic & Expectorant?
No? Well, damn it, there could have been!
It's pretty horrible but I'm not sure it's at all shocking or puzzling. Isn't it the logical conclusion of the combination of conspicuous consumption and celebrity worship that prevails in some quarters nowadays?
And I can imagine a young romantic (first time round) thinking: "OK I've got Byron's hairstyle and dress off to a tee - but I wish I knew what aftershave he used..."
I'd never heard of Cheryl Cole, but it says here that she was "interested in dancing from an early age." What's wrong with that?
It just goes to show that there are two kinds of people: those who think that Hell is other people; and those who want to buy a perfume endorsed by Cheryl Cole.
Which, now that I come to think of it, is the elusive self-proving theorem, the existence of which puts paid to that bugger Godel, shatters much of modern philosophy, mathematics and logic, and deprives us once and for all of even the dream of coherence, inter-personal comparison and ever winning an argument.
It couldn't have been an immensely subtle attack on the Cole person - she and her fame will, like scent, hang about for a bit and then evaporate without trace?
I had no idea who Cheryl Cole was either, but I see the niche in the market has finally opened up for the perfume range I myself have wanted to launch for a long time.
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