My View: Catherine Scott

Apparently getting a celebrity to endorse your brand or wear your clothing can boost sales considerably and make your products more attractive. And it is all down to science.

According to researchers in Holland seeing a celebrity endorse a pair of shoes alters a woman’s brain activity – even if she does not drop everything to get her feet into the latest Jimmy Choos.

The Dutch team scanned the brains of 24 women as they looked at pictures of celebrities and attractive non-famous contemporaries sporting certain shoes. When confronted with a celebrity, the team documented heightened activity in a certain part of the brain – the medial orbitofrontal cortex. The same was not observed when pictures of an attractive non-celebrity were presented.

They suggested that this activity links the celebrity with the product in a part of the brain associated with feeling affection. But what happens when the brand doesn’t approve of the lifestyle its celebrity endorser lives or the product gets picked up by some one they feel doesn’t fit their image? In the early noughties, Burberry was hit with what was dubbed “the Chav problem” when sales plummeted after its iconic beige check fabric was adopted by a certain section of society. However Burberry started to fight back. They removed checked baseball caps from sale and reduced the visibility of their distinctive pattern. But now US clothing brand Abercrombie and Fitch seems to be falling prey to a similar phenomenon across the Pond. The fashion label has offered to pay the rowdy, hard-partying cast of MTV reality show The Jersey Shore not to wear its clothes. The company said their association with the clothing was “contrary to the aspirational nature of our brand”. It singled out Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, saying he could cause “significant damage to our image”. The show portrays the loud, hedonistic, mostly Italian-American cast carousing in the US state of New Jersey.The programme’s fourth season, which followed the cast to Italy, premiered this month on MTV.

“We are deeply concerned that Mr Sorrentino’s association with our brand could cause significant damage to our image,” the company said in a statement.”We understand that the show is for entertainment purposes, but believe this association is contrary to the aspirational nature of our brand, and may be distressing to many of our fans.”

The company operates more than 1,000 stores in North America, Europe (including 21 in the UK) and Japan and is known for the squeaky-clean, all-American look of its models. Whether Mr Sorrentino accepts their offer is yet to be seen, but it just shows how closely these brands guard their image.