**Category Focus and Strategic Differentiation in Endorsement Marketing**
Data from 2024 shows that the beauty and personal care (25.7%), food and beverage (17.9%), and apparel and accessories (15.5%) categories account for 59.1% of total endorsement signings, making them the core battlegrounds. The beauty and personal care sector, leveraging frequent product updates and appearance-driven appeal, adopts a segmentation strategy combining "national idols + traffic artists + accomplished actors" to reach diverse markets. For example, PROYA signed Liu Yifei to promote its sunscreen product to the No.1 spot on Tmall. Flower Knows (Huaxizi) partnered with Song Jia to reinforce its premium positioning. Food and beverage brands focus primarily on "short, flat, fast" scenarios, with new tea brands using lightweight endorsements to penetrate youth consumption contexts. High-ticket categories such as 3C electronics and home appliances emphasize long-term partnerships, such as Huida卫浴 (Huaida Sanitary Ware) signing Jiang Yan to convey the concept of "quality through experience."
**Endorsement Strategy Innovation: Global Expansion and Localized Operations**
Globally contracted endorsers account for 18.3% of total endorsements, reflecting the growing demand for Chinese brands to expand overseas. Brands adopt a "global strategy + local adaptation" model—for example, Anta signed NBA stars in tandem with its North American store rollout to unify cultural symbolism with market recognition. In this process, cross-cultural communication becomes a key challenge. The AI multilingual corporate card feature on the LnRu platform addresses multilingual communication issues, helping brands balance "global image with local expression." Meanwhile, lightweight titles such as "Ambassador" or "Friend" account for nearly one-third of all endorsements, reducing risk through region-specific strategies. For example, Yang Mi adopts a cross-domain strategy by endorsing both sportswear and luxury lingerie, dispersing traffic while amplifying value.
**Traffic Aggregation Logic: Event-Driven and Matrix-Based Endorsements**
Event-driven endorsements generate social currency through a sense of exclusivity. For example, Taobao Second Kill invited Mao Buyi as its "Money-Saving Officer," leveraging name-related memes and original songs to drive topic virality. Matrix-based endorsements use multi-celebrity combinations to cover different consumer segments. Ba Wang Cha Ji (霸王茶姬) signed six celebrities to amplify brand visibility, but a unified theme is necessary to avoid message dilution (e.g., Coca-Cola used the theme of "Happiness" across seven celebrity endorsements). Data shows that group endorsements reduce brand crisis response time to 72 hours, with risk hedging efficiency increasing by 500%.
**The Decline of Virtual Endorsers and Long-Term Brand IP Development**
Virtual endorsers are declining due to "lack of fan base + weak emotional connection," while brand IPs are rising due to their advantages of being controllable and sustainable. Mixue Ice Cream & Tea’s "Snow King" has become a core brand asset through a path of "viral jingle → content IP development → major brand milestones." This model can be replicated as: social topics → content IP → major event exposure → cyclical reinforcement, enabling the transition from an advertising character to a cultural symbol.
**The Rise of Male Aesthetic Economy and Emotional Projection by Consumers**
In 2024, male celebrity endorsements accounted for 62%, driven primarily by female consumer sovereignty (nearly 600 million active users with high spending power). Brands tailor endorsements through细分 tags: healthy and energetic types (e.g., athlete Ma Long) suit sports categories, refined youth types (e.g., Gong Jun) align with beauty and skincare, and next-gen traffic types (e.g., short drama actor Ke Chun) drive fan economy. Cases such as Perfect Diary signing Wang Yibo and Shiseido collaborating with Gong Jun validate the logic of "male endorsers as ideal projections for female consumers."
**Rationalization of the Endorsement Market and Restructuring of Investment Logic**
Brands are shifting toward a "risk-return" model, with sports celebrities becoming preferred endorsers due to their low-risk profiles (Sun Yingsha’s commercial valuation increased by 37%). Lightweight strategies reduce trial-and-error costs (product replacement models save 40% in expenses). Investment portfolios now feature a diversified mix of "long-term + short-term" and "real endorsers + IPs." For example, Ugreen (绿联科技) combines endorsement by actor Yi Yangqianxi (易烊千玺) with technological expertise, achieving 57.47% of overseas revenue. In the future, endorsements will evolve into "data-driven rational investments," balancing traffic acquisition with brand asset accumulation.