Brands & Brand Ambassadors

We all know that branding a product or business or a startup involves a number of strategies to create “brand recall”. Besides the quality of the product or service, which the customers realize only when they have used them at least once, there are some steps to be taken to attract the customers to a business.

Engaging a brand ambassador is one such strategy.

Technically, a brand ambassador is a person, usually a popular person, who has already got a considerable fan following: actors, pop stars, sports persons, social activists, and even politicians who can be used as crowd-pullers. And those with such reputation do not come cheap.

A brand ambassador is also called a brand’s spokesperson, and there are several types. Celebrities and employees are the ones a business can engage or retain. Friends, family, and loyal customers are unpaid but very trustworthy. While celebrities are the most expensive option and out of reach for budget-strained businesses and startups, the other types come in handy for any business.

Does a business need a brand ambassador?

There are critics who question the need for any brand ambassador at all. They can quote a number of businesses without any celebrity endorsements that are highly successful and profitable. You cannot argue with them. They have a point.

Abhishek Sanwal opined on Quora that there was no hard and fast rule that only human celebrities could popularize a brand. He mentioned Chintamani of ICICI India insurance, 7up’s Fido, and ZooZoo of Vodafone to illustrate how a cartoon character, given the right treatment, can do more for a brand than a living person.

How the celebrity ambassador culture began

When the Swiss watchmaker Omega, the first to put a watch on the Moon, appointed Cindy Crawford, the highest-paid supermodel at that time, as its brand ambassador in 1995 to get out of a sales slump, their numbers soared beyond expectations. The rest of the international business world followed not only Omega’s time but also its business tact.

Almost every international brand has a global brand ambassador promoting its products. The craze has gone to such heights that there is stiff competition among businesses to retain the most popular celebrities. It has become something of a status symbol to have a particular celebrity as your brand ambassador.

A casual glance at the money involved makes your head reel. Pepsi paid $50 million to Beyonce. Chanel paid $7 million to Brad Pitt for a one-year campaign. Adidas signed David Beckham for life at a staggering $150 million. Nike retained Tiger Woods on a five-year, $100 million contract to endorse its sportswear, even with all that negative publicity. LeBron James pocketed $90 million on a seven-year deal with Nike and more from partnerships with Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. Rapper 50 Cent grossed $100 million by striking a deal with Glacau, a vitamin water company. And the celebrity couple Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady are believed to have amassed $283 million in endorsements. Does anyone still think this brand ambassador rush is useless?

Creative directors: the new title

In recent times, brand ambassadors are being given a new title: creative director. What the creative director does depends entirely on the product they endorse or the company they represent.

In 2010, Lady Gaga, while promoting her new album The Fame Monster, was appointed as creative director for Polaroid’s imaging products. In 2012, Budweiser’s Bud Light Premium brought on musician Justin Timberlake as creative director and proudly announced that the beer became the number one new beer brand that year. In 2013, Diet Coke brought on fashion designer Marc Jacobs as its creative director. This phenomenon of brand ambassadors taking on more than one responsibility and title is going to stay for some time to come.

What about small businesses and startups?

Can startups and small businesses afford high-paid celebrities? No.

So what is to be done? They can take the help of other types of brand ambassadors: employees and good old customers. Two birds with one shot.

A business that cannot afford a celebrity can have that gap filled by its own staff. Starting from a salesperson to the CEO, everyone can be a brand ambassador, provided they are trained and treated with compassion and encouragement with proper incentives.

A logo, a brochure, a company’s website, loyal staff members, and loyal customers can all be brand ambassadors when they rightly communicate the company’s message.

Hua Jian, Ph.D., an assistant professor of public relations at Syracuse University, wrote in one of her papers that “by having passionate employees who adore their brand, organizations not only benefit from their external ambassadors’ word-of-mouth marketing but also generate increased revenues.” She also quoted Chris Boudreaux and Susan Emerick stating that in social media, “people, not brands, are the channel.” Rebecca Feldman’s LinkedIn talent blog discussed how organizations can benefit from their employees’ social media presence to turn them into brand ambassadors through clear, actionable communications and training programs.

Cricky Cicchetti went even further by suggesting that in-house brand ambassadors (employees) could be thought of as a hybrid between public relations officers and human resources officers, doing both the tasks of educating consumers about a brand and helping them in any way they could.

Brand influencers and evangelists

There is also another kind of ambassador called a brand influencer or “brand evangelist” who makes a brand more popular in the truest sense. Anybody who talks positively about a particular brand can be that brand’s influencer.

Each of us has at least one experience where we talk about a particular product being the best or the most useful without any personal benefit in return. A co-passenger on a train or flight, a colleague, or even a stranger at the garage may ask your opinion on some product, and you, from first-hand experience, voluntarily support the brand (or oppose it), and then you become the brand influencer.

This type of influencer is found in great numbers on the internet. I often write reviews on the places I visit, the hotels and restaurants I stay and eat at on vacation, and post them on my personal as well as commercial websites like TripAdvisor. Nobody pays for these reviews. We write them to express our experiences, satisfaction or dissatisfaction, openly.

According to marketing strategy experts, 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family more than what they see and hear from commercials. 70% of online consumers confess that they trust messages and reviews from others on social media, and the percentage increases every year. A small business that can harness these inexpensive but loyal and trusted brand ambassadors, employees and influencers alike, can make a big name for itself within no time.

Your friend the brand manager

As an entrepreneur or small business owner, you will often be the only one responsible for the development of your brand. But success breeds its own challenges.

Once your business has grown enough, you will find less and less time to oversee your brand’s growth and direction, and your brand will suffer for it. That is when you need a brand manager.

Brand managers are integral to any business that sells consumer products. Depending on the organization, they may be responsible for a single major product or a portfolio of many similar product lines. They handle promotion and growth, exploring different marketing strategies and tactics.

Unlike the marketing department, whose scope covers the entire range of products and the company’s image as a whole, a brand manager narrows the focus down to specific product lines. This allows them to immerse themselves in a single brand and devote all effort toward that brand’s success.

They maintain brand discipline as product lines shift. New technologies, new products, and product improvements are being released all the time, and the brand manager ensures the brand’s message stays constant throughout its growth. This means consistent marketing messages and keeping new products relevant to the brand’s value proposition.

They perform statistical analysis because no brand marketing campaign can be truly effective without data. A brand manager takes in current and historical sales data, compares it with product performance, spots market trends and possible sales issues, and tailors the approach to cover performance weaknesses the data has uncovered.

They guide every aspect of a product’s image. There is more to a brand than just advertising. Brand perception also relates to public perception, consumer reviews, price points, and even packaging. The brand manager identifies which elements will garner the most results while still delivering on the brand’s core values.

They advocate the brand to consumers. A brand manager communicates regularly with consumers and presents the brand’s benefits and selling points. But they are not a salesperson. They are an advocate whose focus is not the sale but whether the product can actually help the customer. The brand manager’s loyalty is to the consumer and the brand, not to the company’s bottom line.

And they represent the brand internally. The brand manager is loyal to the brand first and foremost. This often means dealing with internal company actions or plans that may offset the image the brand is trying to present. They educate employees and management on what the brand stands for, and try to ensure that any future actions affect the brand positively.