Marketing Secrets from a Celebrity and Brand Matchmaker

Have you ever wondered what it's like to work with celebrities? 

Ric Bachrach knows. 

He is the president and CEO of Celebrity Focus Inc. which connects famous people with famous brands to expand their reach and impact.

Ric, an expert at finding the perfect celebrities for marketing, advertising, and public relations campaigns, recently spoke with Zoetica founder Kami Huyse about what he thinks has made his business a success. 

Top Marketing Secrets

Here are his top secrets and insights, which you can apply to YOUR business.

Be creative and think big

Just because you haven’t done something before doesn’t mean you can’t do it now. Early in his career, Ric organized the biggest youth hockey summer camps in Chicago, bringing on board NHL players and equipment manufacturers. That success taught him to look at situations creatively and always consider unique ways to achieve his goals. “I live in a world of possibility,” he says.

Know your strengths and build from there 

Back in 1987 Ric realized that while he enjoyed working with athletes (in addition to being a former athlete, he previously was a hockey coach at Northwestern University), his strength lay in making business deals rather than representing talent. “The fact was I loved both [coaching and business], but I got as much juice out of my business career as I did out of coaching,” he notes. “For me to make that decision to leave coordinated sports, bet on myself and go solo, it was a gamble, but it was also a good one.”

Follow the most strategic path 

Figure out how to get from point A to B in the smartest way possible. The agency and brand clients Ric works with know that even if they’ve worked with celebrities before, it’s not their area of expertise. Hiring Celebrity Focus to serve as the bridge between brand and talent therefore makes sense from both a time and financial perspective. “In every single case, the [celebrity] spokesperson serves a single purpose; they’re there to be the vehicle for dissemination of corporate messages,” he explains. “You can accomplish an awful lot of things without A-list talent, you just need to have the right match.”

Go for win-win experiences

Even in business there are situations so magnificent that the experience itself provides greater value than the payment. Ric’s client British American Racing hired Emmy award winning actor James Garner for a campaign that demanded two weeks of his time and required traveling halfway around the world. Garner, a passionate auto racer, received only a modest fee and later admitted that he would have worked for free. “It’s not always about the money,” says Ric. “Money is just one of the things.” Creating a great experience for everyone involved matters just as much.

Refresh your business on a regular basis 

Your business needs to keep up with the times in order to grow, so consider regular refreshes to ensure you’re effectively representing the expertise and quality you deliver. It took a friend’s recommendation that he take down his agency’s website to convince Ric that he needed a complete refresh. He invested the time and resources to design and launch a brand new site that now accurately reflects the caliber of his services. “My clients are all pretty big, and the same things with the agencies who represent them,” says Ric. “Their first look at my website has got to be able to speak to a few things, number one, this person’s on our level in terms or capability, and number two, this person knows exactly what he’s talking about.”

Be great at what you do

If you want great clients you’ve got to be great at what you do, and Ric argues that a relentless pursuit of precision and excellence will get you there. “I am a believer that greatness is a choice,” he says. What differentiates highly successful people from others is their “relentless nature of direction and excellence towards their craft… and I think that’s something that [can apply] to each of us.” 

Ric is a member of Smart Social Mastery and joined through the Instant Authority workshop. Are you interested in increasing your visibility? Sign up for the FREE Instant Authority Workshop! Register here.