November 15, 2007 | 1:25pm
"Every Honeywell employee is a brand ambassador. With every customer contact and whenever we represent Honeywell, we have the opportunity either to strengthen the Honeywell brand or to cause it to lose some of its luster and prestige." I have also seen it used to describe celebrities that are hired as spokespeople. For example, that same search gave me these results: "Toyota has roped in actor Aamir Khan as its Brand Ambassador for its utility vehicle Innova." "TAG Heuer today announced Hollywood superstars Brad Pitt and Uma Thurman as brand ambassadors." In the Web 2.0 world we are engaging new technologies to communicate with our prospects and customers. These new technologies, including (but not limited to) your web site, webcasts and podcasts, are new vehicles for your brand ambassadors. As we implement these new technologies, are we being good brand guardians, ensuring that we deliver on our brand promise and help our prospects and customers experience our brand? My search also turned up the following reference. It expands the discussion of brand ambassadors beyond employees and those that you might hire to be your ambassadors. "Brand ambassadors are similar to brand evangelists in that they also have a vested interest in seeing their favorite brand succeed. It's not so much that they attempt to influence other customers to buy a product, but that they share their passion for a brand with their fellow customers. Whereas a company markets to customers in order to sell more products, brand ambassadors attempt to relay their passion for a brand to other customers". A reality of the Web 2.0 world is that marketers are no longer in complete control of the conversation. On-line communities, blogs and professional social networks provide your customers and prospects with the ability to talk further and wider about you and their experiences with you. Hopefully they will be ambassadors for your brand and what they say is reflecting positively on your brand. As a brand guardian do you know where these conversations are taking place? Are you monitoring the conversations? Are you participating in them? These are the interesting times we were warned about – is it a curse or an opportunity? |
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John Quelch, a Professor at Harvard Business School, and director of WPP Group plc has written about How to Build a B2B Brand. In this post, he claims the CEO should be (as you say) the brand ambassador.
In addition, Dr. Quelch provides three reasons brand-building should be important to B2B CEOs. I will quote from his post those three reasons, and add four of my own:
"First, most B2B marketers have to address thousands of small businesses as well as enterprise customers. They cannot do so economically using the traditional direct sales force.
Second, if left unattended, individual managers will each do their own adhoc marketing. The result will be a hodgepodge of corporate logos, taglines and packaging. Customers will be confused and the company will look disorganized.
Third, B2B marketers are realizing that developing brand awareness among their customers' customers can capture a larger share of channel margins and build loyalty that can protect them against lower-priced competitors."
Now for my additional points:
Fourth, selling through the channel requires a strong brand. Channel partners need a brand to promote as they (almost never) have a brand that businesses want to buy from. Business buyers are comfortable buying from a channel partner if they represent a brand with which the buyer is familiar.
Fifth, the brand is the tip of the arrow of marketing. A strong brand enables the rest of the marketing (and sales) to get through to the buyer. The business buyer needs to know who the company is before they'll pay attention to what they have to say.
Sixth, a strong B2B brand enables a higher margin because the "brand promise" provides a lower risk to the decision maker, and enables that decision maker to justify their decision to others - because the brand is familiar to them as well. "Nobody every got fired for buying from IBM" is the ultimate brand promise.
Seventh, a poor branding effort creates a poor brand promise. For exam
