Get Ahead or Get Behind

Using a professional athlete to market your product has many major advantages. The biggest advantage that I feel using a professional athlete offers is that they are given the spotlight many times a year they are watched twenty four hours a day so if they promote a specific product it will be seen more often than any other form of marketing. As well as being seen more often the product will be shown in use and so its not a artificial advertisement, it will also promote more people to use the product because the American way is to be like our heroes, or idols however you want to classify it.
The second advantage of using a professional athlete to market your product is merely a simple answer, Children. However the depth is much deeper than that, if the companies use athletes to market their product than children are more likely to want to imitate the professional athletes than adults are. If that company gets the children hooked on their product at a young age than their length of time of returning customers is much longer therefore they waste less time trying to get return customers because they can focus on hooking the new young customers that will become customers for life and then they grow up and still use the same product than they pass the belief in that product on to their children.
If you look at the money that is made because of the marketing success you will see your leaders such as Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and many more that use professional athletes as their main marketing source. Nike came out with Air Jordan’s using Michael Jordan. Adidas came out with the T-Macs using Tracy McGrady. These two examples are only a few of the many that are out there.
Having a professional athlete has a much larger chance of success than if it was marketed elsewhere, number one because these people are well known and well respected, two gets more publicity without additional cost, and is ongoing there are always athletes willing to promote because of opportunities to shed more light upon their play, or their sport in the case of Tiger Woods. Tiger made an already popular golf product used by NIKE a more envied product. This caused more people who may not typically play golf to go play just because they want to try the new product. This has made of them new lovers of the sport.