Brand Ambassadors

Recently I was on a conference call as part of the Shankminds program (which, if you’re entrepreneurial, you should totally check out), and the topic of brand ambassadors came up. Peter put me on the spot to talk a bit about my experience, and I think I gave a pretty okay answer. But while out on a long bike ride, I kept thinking about it. What’s below is a more organized and even okayer overview of my thoughts.

Three things about brand ambassador programs:

1. If people don’t love you already, this won’t fix it
2. Reward ambassadors, incentivize celebrities (not the other way around)
3. Picking your ambassadors is the start, not the end

If you start out by designing a brand ambassador program that pays people to participate — either in money or product or both — then you’re fundamentally starting in the wrong place. Authentic ambassador behaviors are something that should be rewarded, not incentivized. That’s a critical distinction. If you have to pay people in advance to say nice things about you, then it’s time to ask a harder question: “why aren’t people saying nice things about you already?”.

Ultimately, brand ambassador programs should be an answer to the question “How do we collect and amplify the positive feedback we’re getting?”

Ok, so let’s assume you’re awesome, and people are saying nice things about you already. Fantastic. Let’s talk about the second fundamental thing to remember — the behavior you’re interested in is their ability to authentically and enthusiastically talk about you in a positive and relatable way. That does not mean they’re pre-equipped to tell the right group of other people about you. Marketing is still the right message to the right person at the right time. Your ambassadors have the message, but it’s your responsibility to get it to the right people at the right time. It’s very common for a brand ambassador program to be deemed a failure because the company was actually grading the program based on their ambassador’s abilities to bring an audience along with them. Your best brand ambassador — the one with the best stories, the most heartfelt admiration, the one with the most compelling narratives — they may only have 38 twitter followers. And that’s totally okay.

This is exactly why selecting your ambassadors is really the starting line. Now it’s your job to give them the stage from which to speak. Your social media accounts can repost their comments. Your PR teams can line them up with journalist interviews. Your ad campaigns can feature their pictures. That’s your role in all this — you need to be the broadcaster. This also has a benefit that you maintain control your message by deciding what you amplify, when, and to whom.

Brand ambassadors are fundamentally different from celebrity endorsements. Celebs are great; they bring an embedded audience, and can have meaningful impacts quickly — both positive and negative. But these are typically transactional, incentivized relationships. As such, they should be managed and measured differently. In the rare instance that a celebrity naturally endorses you because they actually love what you do: AWESOME! But realize that these are exceedingly rare & impossible to plan for, and thus not a good thing to hinge your future on.

Lastly, a very short anecdotal case study: Years ago at Specialized I designed an ambassador program called the “Trail Crew” (though I don’t recall us ever calling it an ambassador program. Each year, we equipped a small group of carefully chosen people with bikes and gear, aligned them with their local bike shop to run rides from, built them a blog to post to, took them all to Colorado to ride together for a week, and generally had a great time. The most interesting part was one unplanned but very visible success metric: two of those ambassadors became full time employees. It wasn’t why we did it, but they’re both still there, positively impacting that brand every day. Success can take many forms, so keep your eyes open.