Dry January is upon us and as many mere mortals try to stay
on the wagon and off the cream cakes, celebrities are leading the charge to
inspire mass weight loss and the often associated positive
celebrity PR that follows.
Amongst the celebrity slimmer’s urging us to buy their DVDs
is Josie Gibson.
Josie won Big Brother in 2010 and since then, she has
publicly battled with her yo-yoing weight. Last summer, pictures emerged
of her in a bikini on a beach in Spain, looking massively overweight and
covered in cellulite. Six months later and Josie is gracing the cover of Fabulous magazine revealing a three
stone weight loss, having slimmed down from a curvy size 20 to a svelte size
10.
With the transformation being so extreme, the DVD is bound
to be a best seller and Josie’s profile will continue to build.
The fact is weight loss/gain is great PR for modern day
celebrities. It is something society and women in particular, are
fascinated by – so there will always be an appetite for it.
One of the biggest transformations of 2012 was former Birds of a Feather and Emmerdale star Pauline Quirke. She
managed to lose a staggering 8 stone on the LighterLife weight-loss programme
in just 8 months and has never looked better.
From a PR perspective, this did wonders for Pauline’s
profile because out of all the high profile celebrities in the UK, she has
always been overweight and never attempted to slim-down.
Having suffered a hip replacement before she was 50 years
old, Pauline felt it was time to get in shape and LighterLife was the weight
loss company to endorse her. If press coverage is anything to go by, the
partnership was a match made in heaven.
Not only did Pauline appear in every magazine and newspaper
going, her online presence rocketed. Her appearance on ITV’s This Morning even caused the LighterLife
website to crash because people were clamouring to sign up to the same weight
loss regime as her.
There is one big reason behind the recent success and boom
in LighterLife’s business and that is because they were very shrewd about
hiring a PR consultancy that specialises in celebrity PR, consumer PR and
digital PR. A media relations campaign now needs to combine a variety of
PR strategies to ensure mass awareness is harnessed and clearly choosing the
right PR agency is a vital first step to ensure this.
Jennifer Sales is a UK-blogger who is obsessed by the celebrity and fashion world. She writes on behalf of award-winning London PR agency PHA Media.
