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How Much Does a Brand Ambassador Program Cost?

cost of a brand ambassador program

Organized brand ambassador programs are becoming more popular with companies, but there’s very little information out there about the prices companies can expect to pay for creating and maintaining a brand ambassador program.

So I wanted to give you some information on pricing with this post.  Let me state up front that the prices you see in this post are intended to be used as a guide and a starting point for your research.  The prices you are quoted might be completely different, or they could be exactly in line with what’s listed here.  The prices listed here are based on my experience working with companies on  similar programs, information gained from talking to industry peers and from good old-fashioned online research.

First, let’s start with a definition of a brand ambassador program for the purposes of this post:

A Brand Ambassador Program is an ongoing business initiative designed to create a relationship with select customers that helps the brand work with these customers to reach certain business goals.

Keep in mind that a Brand Ambassador Program is more robust than a Brand or Customer Advocacy program.  These programs typically revolve around engaging with fans to help promote the brand and spread certain messaging about the brand.  A Brand Ambassador Program typically has a self-promotional element for the brand, but it’s also focused on other key business drivers, such as customer feedback, customer service and generating sales.

It’s also important to note that the brand ambassador program is ongoing.  Often when companies think of a brand ambassador program, they are considering something closer to a brand advocate outreach program, or an influencer outreach program.  Both of these are closer to a campaign in structure in that it typically has a starting and ending point.  A brand ambassador program is an ongoing effort.

Since a brand ambassador program is ongoing, there are two major considerations:

1 – Startup and maintenance costs are typically higher

2 – Business gains realized from the program are typically higher

So the answer to the question ‘How Much Does a Brand Ambassador Program Cost?’ is typically ‘it depends’.  Let’s look at the factors that influence the costs of launching a brand ambassador program:

1 – Determining the strategy and desired outcomes from the brand ambassador program.  Answer the ‘what will success look like?’ question.  What needs to happen as a result of this brand ambassador program in order for it to be deemed successful?  You’ll need to do an audit and strategy creation for the proposed program.  This is also where you can decide if it’s financially feasible to go forward and launch your brand ambassador program.

2 – The scope of the program.  Will your program have 5 members initially or 500?  The size of the program at both onset and over time will play a huge role in its cost.  Also, what type of relationship do you want to have with your Ambassadors?  Many brands are excited about the idea of launching a Brand Ambassador program because they like the idea of having passionate customers spread the brand’s message.  Brand promotion is only one way that ambassadors can help grow your brand.  Since ambassadors are constantly in direct contact with other customers, besides selling directly to them, your ambassadors can collect valuable feedback about your brand.  This feedback can then be applied to improve your brand’s existing marketing. design and customer service efforts.  These improvements can lead to a real decrease in business costs that should be considered when calculating the return of having a brand ambassador program.

3 – How many employees will be required to work with the program?  This ties into the previous point.  Keep in mind that the costs associated with this point and the previous one are typically far less when the program is launched, but will likely increase over time as the program matures.  However, as the program matures and grows, it will self-fund any additional staff that’s necessary to the program.

So as you can see, there are a lot of moving parts in place and it is difficult to get exact dollar amounts on the cost of your brand ambassador program.  A good rule of thumb is to shoot for breaking even during the first year of your brand ambassador program.  What I mean by that is have the costs associated with launching the program at least equal the amount of revenue/business value generated from the program’s first year.  Keep in mind that these projections should be included in the strategy plan and audit that’s created in the first point above.  Also keep in mind that in the first year you’ll incur some startup expenses that won’ be a factor after the program is up and running.  So once you factor in program growth and running it more efficiently over time, if you can break even during the first year, you’ll be in good shape.

So What Are the Actual Costs to Launch and Run a Brand Ambassador Program?

First, let’s look at the cost of the Brand Ambassador Audit.  This will give you the strategy for your proposed program, and help you decide if it is financially feasible to launch.

For a Small Business (Up to 500 employees) – cost for the Brand Ambassador Audit is typically $1,500 – $5,000.

For a Medium-Sized Company (500-10,000 employees) – cost for the Brand Ambassador Audit is typically $3,500-$25,000.

For a Large Company (Over 10,000 employees) – cost for the Brand Ambassador Audit is typically $10,000-$50,000

In short, the bigger the company the more extensive the audit required.  This audit is a one-time fee paid before you launch the program.

Next, let’s look at training and ongoing maintenance.  This is where you work directly with your chosen ambassadors to train them on how you want them to engage with customers, and what they should be working to accomplish.  Also included is time devoted to working directly with your ambassadors.  Keep in mind that, as mentioned above, the scope of your brand ambassador program is critical when calculating ongoing costs, as well as returns.  For example, many brands are simply interested in a program that helps them use fans/advocates for self-promotion.  To that end there are plenty of vendors that are focused on helping brands ‘activate’ their brand advocates, such as SocialToaster, Zuberance and Social Chorus.  However, if you also want your program to focus on other areas such as customer feedback, improved customer loyalty, etc, then additional costs will be accrued.

Monthly training and maintenance costs:

Small business – typically $500-$2,500 a month

Mid-sized company – typically $1,000-$10,000 a month

Large company – typically $5,000-$25,000 a month

Again, the main factors here are number of ambassadors (fewer means less cost) and scope of the program (more limited means less cost).

Employee and Ambassador Compensation Costs

Let’s look at the third major area of expense in a Brand Ambassador Program, the costs to compensate employees and ambassadors.  First, keep in mind that you should expect to compensate your ambassadors if you are asking them to perform certain functions on behalf of the brand that they normally would not do.  You will not only spend time training them, you will also be asking them to spend actual time working on behalf of your brand to connect with other customers.  They deserve to be compensated for their time.

This expense will be difficult to nail down, especially at first.  As the program matures you will get a much firmer handle on how much time is needed from both your employees and brand ambassadors and can budget accordingly.  Also as your brand’s ambassador program matures, the amount of time required for training and maintenance per ambassador will decrease to a degree as your processes become more efficient

In short, this expense fluctuates wildly based on what you expect from your brand ambassadors.  Also, keep in mind that you may not need to pay all ambassadors (In fact, paying ambassadors money is often the worst way to compensate them).  In general, if you are asking ambassadors to let you train them, or to jump on regularly scheduled conference calls, or in any way adjust their normal schedules to accommodate an ongoing relationship with your brand that benefits your brand, then you should consider paying the ambassadors.  But if all you are asking your ambassadors to do is hand out a coupon to any customer that expresses an interest in your brand’s products, then maybe not.  It’s a fine line between working with your brand’s fans to do what they want to do anyway (spread their love of your brand), and asking them to invest more time than they would normally.  In short, if it feels like you are asking them to work for your brand, then you should pay them as if they are workers.

For purposes of this post and to give you some numbers to use as a guideline, assume that 10% of your ambassadors will be paid at a rate of 5-10 hours a week.  Also assume that your employees will spend 10 hours a week managing your first 50 ambassadors, and 15 a week managing from 50-100.  Amount of employee time per ambassador will decrease as you add more ambassadors to your program.

So for example, if you have 100 ambassadors in your program, you would pay 10 of them 5-10 hours a week, and your employees would spend 15 hours a week managing the program.  That would total 65-115 hours a week for your brand ambassador program.  And again, this is just an estimate to give you an example of how you could budget time and how many hours compensation the plan would need.  Your actual hours required could be more or less.

So lets now total up the costs:

For a small business, the expenses are:

Brand Ambassador Audit (One-time fee) – $2,500 – $10,000

Monthly training and maintenance – $500 – $2,500

Monthly employee and Ambassador compensation (estimated) – $250 – $1,000

Total Year One costs for a small business to launch a Brand Ambassador program – $11,500 – $52,000

Yearly ongoing costs for a small business to maintain a Brand Ambassador program  – $9,000 – $42,000 each year

For a mid-sized company the expenses are:

Brand Ambassador Audit (One-time fee) – $5,000 – $25,000

Monthly training and maintenance – $1,000 – $10,000

Monthly employee and Ambassador compensation (estimated) – $1,000 – $5,000

Total Year One costs for a mid-sized company to launch a Brand Ambassador program – $29,000 – $205,000

Yearly ongoing costs for a mid-sized company to maintain a Brand Ambassador program  – $24,000 – $180,000 each year

For a large company the expenses are:

Brand Ambassador Audit (One-time fee) – $10,000 – $50,000

Monthly training and maintenance – $5,000 – $25,000

Monthly employee and Ambassador compensation (estimated) – $5,000 – $15,000

Total Year One costs for a large company to launch a Brand Ambassador program – $130,000 – $530,000

Yearly ongoing costs for a large company to maintain a Brand Ambassador program  – $120,000 – $480,000 each year

And again, let me reiterate that all of these numbers and figures are not absolute and should be considered a guide or starting point.

Now that you have the numbers in place based on the size of your company, you can take those numbers and compare them against the projected benefits from a brand ambassador program to decide if such a program makes sense for your brand.

For example, let’s say that you are a mid-sized company that, based on the above formula and numbers, decides that it will cost your brand approximately $50,000 in Year One, and $40,000 annually thereafter to create a brand ambassador program.  Now that you have a handle on the costs of the program, you can then look at the projected benefits from the program and decide if it makes good fiscal sense.

This is why it’s important to understand that in order to get the budget necessary to fund a brand ambassador program, you are going to need to be able to show that the program will generate more than it will cost.  So if you go to your boss with a plan to start a brand ambassador program that will cost $25,000 a year and generate $15,000 annually in sales, you won’t get that check signed.

Here’s a real-world example:  When Fiskars launched the Fiskateers brand ambassador program, it had two key goals:

1 – Increase product sales by 10% in 4 specific cities within 9 months

2 – Increase online mentions of the Fiskars brand by 10% within 9 months

With these specific goals, Fiskars can track the profit it would make from these sales as well as the sales generated from the increase in online mentions, and compare that to the cost of the program, and know if it makes sense.  BTW according to the book Brains on Fire, the Fiskateers program doubled sales in those 4 cities within 9 months and increased online mentions by 240% in the first 4 months.

Again, keep in mind that these numbers are a guide, and your figures might vary greatly.  For example, former Maker’s Mark CEO Bill Samuels Jr has claimed that it cost the brand $2 Million to launch its wildly successful brand ambassador program.  That program is now rumored to have over 500,000 ambassadors, all of which consider it their job to promote the Maker’s Mark brand.

On the other hand, let’s say your brand would love to launch an ambassador program, but you simply don’t have the budget to outsource the creation of such a program.  Here’s an excellent recap of how Paper.li is launching its brand ambassador program in-house.

UPDATE: Kelly Hungerford, who is spearheading Paper.li’s Brand Ambassador program, left a fascinating comment with more information on its program, make sure you check it out.

 

Are you considering launching a Brand Ambassador Program for your company and want to know what it would cost?  I’ll be happy to help answer any questions you have, simply email me!

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How to Convince Your Skeptical Boss to Invest in a Brand Ambassador Program

Whenever you attempt to sell your boss on launching a new initiative, there’s a few things you need to do to improve the boss’ chances of signing off:

1 – Help the boss understand the value

2 – Help the boss understand the cost

3 – Help the boss understand the scope of the initiative and the changes that will be required

 

Unfortunately, the idea of a ‘brand ambassador program’ can mean different things to different organizations, and it’s often difficult for your boss to know what the program is or the impact it could have on their business. When you tell the boss that such a program will cost likely tens of thousands to fully implement and it will take up to a year to see maximum results, well it’s easy to see why many bosses pass.

So in order to improve the chance that your boss signs off on launching a brand ambassador program, we need to address each of your boss’ possible objections head on.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Value of a Brand Ambassador Program

As I mentioned, a brand ambassador program can mean different things to different companies. Some companies, for example, hire infuencers or even celebrities to act as their brand ambassadors. Patagonia is a good example of a company that follows this model. When I work with clients, I typically advise them to structure their brand ambassador program so that the ambassadors they select are current customers that love the brand. These customers are already proactively engaging with other customers and promoting the brand, we are just going to build a program that gives us a framework to work with and connect with them regularly.

In general, there are four ways that brand ambassadors benefit your brand:

1 – Promotion. Brand ambassadors are constantly encouraging other customers to buy from your brand. Even if you don’t connect with them, they are already promoting your brand. These are the customers that will stop you in a store and give you an unsolicited recommendation for a product you are considering. The benefit of having a brand ambassador program is that you can work directly with these customers to help them promote your brand in the specific way that you want.

2 – Reputation Management. Your brand ambassadors are the customers that are online and offline protecting your brand. They are defending you from troll attacks, they are defending you when other customers criticize your brand. The benefit of a brand ambassador program is that it gives you a way to train these customers on how to best respond to complaints about your brand that they encounter either online or off.

3 – Customer Service and Support. Along with the previous point, brand ambassadors will proactively help other current or potential customers with issues associated with your brand and its products. The benefit of a brand ambassador program is that it gives your brand a way to provide training for these customers and to give them a way to contact the brand directly if they encounter a customer who needs more help than they can provide.

4 – Customer Feedback. Brand ambassadors are in constant, direct contact with your customers, and are constantly collecting feedback from them. This is honestly the most underutilized benefit that brand ambassadors provide for your brand. By launching a brand ambassador program, you have a more efficient way to collect, categorize and draw insights from the customer feedback that your ambassadors collect.

 

Now if you’re having to sell your boss on the idea of launching a brand ambassador program, the odds are he doesn’t fully see and/or appreciate the value that ambassadors bring to the table. For example, if you tell your boss that brand ambassadors help your brand by promoting it and the brand’s products, he probably sees the value in that promotion. But when you get further down the list to things like customer support and feedback, the value can appear a bit murkier for a boss that isn’t familiar with the idea of a brand ambassador program to begin with.

And it’s worth remembering that when you launch a brand ambassador program, it will likely need to be a gradual rollout. You will want to start with a smaller group of ambassadors, likely with limited responsibilities. I always tell clients when launching a brand ambassador program to “start small, nail the process down, then expand”.

So out of necessity, and in an attempt to make your best case for a brand ambassador program to your boss, it makes sense to start the rollout of a brand ambassador program gradually. For instance, start with the promotional aspect of a brand ambassador program first. This is where most bosses will understand and see the immediate value.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Cost of a Brand Ambassador Program

Building on the previous section, understand that if you start by first focusing on how your brand ambassadors can better promote the brand, you are also significantly lowering the cost of the program. Think of it as adopting a payment plan system for paying for a brand ambassador program instead of needing all the costs paid upfront. Start smaller, with just the promotional aspect, nail the process, then you expand.

Here’s another key: Start with a smaller group of ambassadors. This will also significantly lower costs. If you envision having a nationwide ambassador program, you could start with a single market, maybe it could be your most prosperous market, maybe it could be the one where your headquarters are. Either way, by starting with a small group focused on only one aspect of the program (promotional), then you greatly reduce the cost of the program, and make it much easier to manage.

Here’s the best part: By adopting this segmented approach, you not only reduce time and cost, you can, if managed correctly, have the brand ambassador program pay for itself as it is launched and rolled out. Increasing promotion will lead to increased sales and increased revenue. That increased revenue can then be used to fund the next stage of the program’s rollout; focused on brand reputation management. If done smartly, the only new costs associated with the program could be those involving the promotional aspect at launch.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Scope of the Initiative and the Changes Involved

By adopting a segmented or tiered launch/rollout of the brand ambassador program, we’ve significantly reduced the scope of the rollout, and the associated costs. Additionally, we are focusing only on the promotional aspect at launch, which is likely the area that even a skeptical boss will see and understand the value in. This also means that necessary changes within your organization will be kept to a minimum. If you start by first focusing on the promotional aspects of a brand ambassador program, this can be launched with minimal disruption or additional work from your staff. Ideally, your brand already has at least one manager for your social media efforts, and this person or team could also assist with helping your best customers promote your brand. Additionally, your brand may want to explore launching a brand ambassador program for your employees, and a promotional aspect is typically the cornerstone of such an initiative.

By starting with just the promotional aspects of a brand ambassador program, you’ve reduced associated costs and maximized the potential benefits.

 

One Final Note About Starting a Brand Ambassador Program

When you bring up the topic of launching a brand ambassador program to your skeptical boss, one of the thoughts he will have (whether he shares it with you or not) is “Ugh, how much is this going to cost us?” It’s worth remembering, and spelling out to your boss, that a brand ambassador programs takes what your business is already doing, and makes it better.

Your boss will likely understand and appreciate the value brand ambassadors can create by promoting your brand and its products. But make sure he understands the other ways that ambassadors can help your brand, and make your current efforts more efficient while also reducing costs.

For example, your brand likely has a set dollar amount placed on every customer service call it receives. In other words, your brand knows what the business cost is for each call it receives.  Let’s say that cost is $7.13 per call based on the call length and what your brand has to pay a customer service representative to handle the call. That means that every time one of your ambassadors helps a customer and eliminates their need to call your brand for customer service, your brand has saved $7.13. Each customer service call that is averted by the actions of your brand ambassadors is a cost-saving to your brand! You can find similar ways to calculate cost savings for reputation management (an improvement of online sentiment by one point results in an X percent increase in sales) and customer feedback as well. These cost-savings that the brand ambassadors create also help offset or even eliminate the cost of expanding the program.

So if you want to improve the chances of getting your skeptical boss to invest in a brand ambassador program, do the following:

  • Don’t try to launch everything at once, focus on a staggered rollout.
  • Start small, with a limited group and focus first on the area that your skeptical boss can clearly see the value in where your brand can quickly see results. Focusing on promotion first is a good start.
  • Once you see results from your initial efforts, grow as necessary, and use gains realized to fund the growth of the program.
  • Make sure your skeptical boss understands that your brand ambassadors will increase sales AND lower costs for your brand.

 

Still have questions about how to sell your skeptical boss on a brand ambassador program? Fill out this contact form and I’ll be happy to help you!

 

 

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How Much Money Can a Brand Ambassador Program Save Your Company?

How much money will a brand ambassador program save your company?

Too many companies avoid launching a brand ambassador program because they view it as a new expense that will live by itself within your organization. Nothing could be further from the truth. In actuality, a brand ambassador program is an investment that makes your existing business processes more effective and efficient. When your boss asks why your company should launch a brand ambassador program, you say “it takes what we are already doing and it makes it better.”

Earlier this month I wrote a post titled How to Create a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program. In that post, I stated that at a later date I would be writing a more in-depth post describing how your brand can better integrate a brand ambassador program into its existing business structure.  This is that post.

A well-designed brand ambassador program will directly impact and improve several key business and marketing functions, such as; customer service, product design, brand reputation management, sales and promotion.  Let’s look at how a brand ambassador program could save your company money in each area:

Reduction in Customer Service Calls/Interactions

Your brand ambassadors are constantly interacting with current and potential customers both online and offline. Often, they can answer questions and help solve problems that others are having.  Each time they do, it eliminates the need for that person to contact your brand’s customer service reps.

Over time, this can generate a serious cost-savings for your brand. Once you know the internal cost your brand assigns to each customer service call or email or social media question (these numbers can be different based on the channel they originate from), then you can begin to determine the exact amount saved by your brand ambassadors.

For example, let’s say your brand has determined that each call to a customer service rep costs the brand $8.32.  This means that each time a brand ambassador helps a customer and eliminates a call, your brand saves $8.32! Let’s say you have 50 brand ambassadors in your program and they average eliminating 40 calls a year per ambassador. That’s a cost-savings of $16,640 a year for your brand!

 

Customer Feedback Improves Product Design 

So what would this look like in the real-world? At a basic level, it would simply involve training your ambassadors to be better listeners to other customers and to better record their feedback and thoughts so your brand can act on it. Keep in mind, your brand should also be doing this with your customer service teams, routinely asking them to give you reports on what customers are consistently saying, good and bad, about your brand, and its products.

Another option could be creating an online group/forum/community where ambassadors or even other customers could share brand and product feedback. Dell has already been doing this for over a decade with its Ideastorm online customer feedback site. The idea behind Ideastorm is so simple, it’s brilliant. Customers submit ideas for improving existing products, or offering new ones. The community then votes on the ideas it likes, and the most popular ideas get reviewed by Dell, and possibly implemented! With Ideastorm, Dell is basically crowdsourcing its customers for ideas. It’s a great way to get very low-cost market research. Rock stars like Lady Gaga have been doing this for years, creating sites just for fans, then using feedback and ideas generated by those fans to influence tour stops and merchandise selection.

According to Dell, each idea submitted to Ideastorm (over 27k so far) has a value to the brand of $10,000, and the site has generated over $100M in additional revenue for Dell! All because Dell got serious about listening to its customers and implementing their ideas.

 

Proactively Empowering Ambassadors to Engage With Customers Improves and Defends Your Brand’s Reputation

It’s one of the nightmare scenarios for social media managers across the country: Encountering an angry customer complaining about your brand on social media. What’s worse is finding a post on your Facebook brand page criticizing your brand that was left TWO HOURS AGO! Since that time, 5 more people have piled on, and now your Facebook page is filled with complaints about your brand, front and center for all to see.

If you’ve ever had to deal with such an issue on social media, you know what a headache it can be. One way to greatly lessen the chance of having to deal with such a social media firestorm is by empowering your brand ambassadors to defend your brand online. The great thing about your fans is that they act like guard dogs. If someone comes into your yard (or Facebook page) and tries to start trouble, they bark.  Loud. If the person is a troll, the barking will often scare them away. If the person is a customer with a legitimate complaint, your brand ambassadors can often help the customer AND alert your brand so that a representative can reply as well. Your brand ambassadors can alert you to complaints that need to be addressed as well as issues they are seeing other customers mentioning repeatedly. To be clear, your brand should already be aggressively monitoring customer feedback, but having your ambassador alerting you as just means that you can deal with any potential issues quicker, which improves both your brand reputation and your ability to handle customer complaints before they grow into a bigger problem.

For example, one client told me that by aggressively monitoring feedback from customers, it effectively creates a two-week window for the brand to solve a widespread problem and address customer complaints before industry press notices and reports on the issue. This is a function of the brand being proactive in addressing complaints from customers, and a big part of that is getting information from customers as soon as possible. Having your ambassadors interact with customers daily can help your brand identify potential issues and respond in much less time. This improves your brand’s reputation, as well as letting you deal with customer complaints quickly, regardless of whether it’s an individual issue or a systemic one.

 

Your Brand Ambassadors Can Greatly Reduce Promotional Costs, Especially For a Product Launch 

I’ve always told clients that cash should be a last resort when compensating your brand ambassadors. Instead, I challenge clients to think about how they can use access as a form of compensation. The problem with paying ambassadors with cash is that you frame their work as being a ‘job’. If you’ve chosen the right ambassadors, then you’ve chosen special customers that already love and promote your brand. You’re just working with them in a formal way to help them do what they already love doing.

Customers that love your brand want more access to your brand. One easy way to do this is to give your ambassadors early access to products before they are made available to the public. This is a true perk for your ambassadors, plus it also serves multiple benefits to your brand:

  1. It allows your ambassadors to give your brand immediate feedback on the product. This allows you to get a better sense of which features/characteristics of the product they enjoy, and you can highlight these features when you promote the product to your general customer base.
  2. Giving your ambassadors early access to new products allows them to create word of mouth about the products. This drives interest and demand for the products at launch. Think of how you give the press early access to review products so they will write about them. It’s the same idea here, the big difference is, your ambassadors LOVE your brand and will be more likely to enthusiastically promote the new product to others, and passionately so!

So how does this translate into a cost-savings? By letting your ambassadors drive promotion prior to and during launch, you can potentially reduce the amount of money you would normally spend on traditional advertising to support the launch. Ford has done this in the past when launching new vehicles, they would lean on ambassadors to build buzz and interest. Here’s Ford’s EVP Jim Farley detailing how this worked for the automaker during a product launch:

“What happens is, by launching the vehicle early, getting people involved in talking about the new global Focus or the new Fiesta is the US before it goes on sale, we can lower the amount of traditional advertising we do after the vehicle goes on sale.  That’s where the massive cost savings have been.  I’ll give you an example; On the Fiesta Movement, we had higher unaided nameplate awareness than Fit or Yaris, and we spent 10 cents on the dollar, than a traditional tv ad campaign.  So by starting earlier and using social media to spread the word about the new product, we’re really reducing the amount of traditional advertising we have to spend.”

So by empowering its ambassadors to help promote these car models at launch, Ford spent 10% what it would have spent on a television ad campaign to achieve the same level of exposure!  Scott Monty, formerly Ford’s Global Social Media Lead, added:

“We had a higher level of awareness for the subcompact than for vehicles we had in the market for 2-3 years; we collected over 125,000 hand-raisers who indicated they wanted to learn more when the car became available; and the conversion of reservations to sales was 10X higher than our traditional conversion rate.

All before we began any major media efforts toward the launch of the Fiesta.”

Additionally, this speaks to how we tend to trust messages that originate from fellow customers more than those that originate with a brand.  A message coming from a brand is often viewed as being an advertisement, whereas we tend to be more likely to pay attention to and trust a message or recommendation that comes from a fellow customer. Ford tapped into that dynamic with the results it saw with its launch of the Fiesta.

The takeaway? Tapping your brand ambassadors to build awareness for your product can be more cost-effective than using traditional advertising to generate the same levels of exposure!

 

A Well-Designed Brand Ambassador Program Will Improve Your Existing Business Functions and Save You Money

Most companies plan a brand ambassador program to be a stand-alone effort. It shouldn’t be. A well-designed brand ambassador program will positively impact several of your core business functions, resulting in increased sales and lowered costs:

  • Customer service costs are lowered because your brand ambassadors are interacting directly with customers, helping them solve their problems and answer their questions. This eliminates the need to contact your customer service reps, which saves you money.
  • Customer feedback can improve product design and identify issues before they become larger problems. Since your brand ambassadors are interacting directly with your customers, they become aware of potential issues with your products in advance, giving your brand time to address them and improve the designs. This saves you money by improving customer satisfaction and potentially eliminating the need for later product recalls.
  • Your brand ambassadors will help defend your brand online, which reduces the brand’s need to engage and ‘put out fires’, which saves your social media team a lot of time, and perhaps more importantly to them, a lot of headaches.
  • Brand ambassadors are powerful promotional partners, especially when you have a new product launch. Giving your ambassadors early access to new products before they are made available to the public lets them create promotion and buzz for the products before they launch. The increased promotion can potentially reduce or even eliminate the traditional marketing efforts you were planning to support the product at launch.

There will always be costs associated with launching and maintaining a well-run brand ambassador program. But with proper planning, your brand ambassador program should not only generate profits, it should save your brand real money.

Want to learn how much money your company could save with a brand ambassador program? Email me today and let’s discuss the possibilities!

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How to Compensate Brand Ambassadors Without Paying Them Money: A Real-World Example

Poorboys SSR1 + Black Hole + Natty’s Red = Purdy

A post shared by Mack Collier (@mackcollier) on

Want to learn more about how much it will cost to create a Brand Ambassador Program for your company? Check out Mack’s Rate Sheet.

It’s almost Spring (I keep reminding myself of this through a bitterly cold January), and with warmer weather comes the chance to engage in one of my favorite hobbies; detailing my car. I fell into detailing a few years ago when I stumbled upon a forum for detailers and read how they gushed about how their ‘high end’ washes and waxes did such a great job on their vehicles. I was skeptical, I mean wax is wax, right?  Is that stuff that costs $20 really better than the $5 tin I can get at Walmart?

Finally, I decided to take the plunge, and bought one of the waxes that the ‘experts’ were recommending.  I could not believe how much better my car looked.  The paint shined and sparkled more than any new car on any lot.  I was hooked from that point forward.

So every Spring, I start going through my shopping list of items I need to buy to protect and beautify my car’s paint in the Spring and Summer.  For years I’ve been a big fan of the Klasse Twins (AIO & SG), but a couple years ago I started using the Poorboys line and have been thrilled with the results (The picture above is the hood of my car after using three of their products). I thought this would be a good chance to talk to you about the idea of compensating brand ambassadors and how you can do it without paying your ambassadors money.

Let’s use Poorboys as an example. I don’t think Poorboys has a brand ambassador program, but if they did, I’d love to join. But I wouldn’t be interested in being compensated with cash, after all, I’d just spend it on Poorboys’ products!

Whenever I work with clients on crafting brand ambassador programs, I tell them to focus on access more than cash as a form of compensation. If I were a brand ambassador for Poorboys, I wouldn’t want cash as compensation, I’d want access.  Specifically, I’d want access to try new products before they hit the market, but also, I’d want access to expert advice on which Poorboys’ products would be best for my vehicle.  One of the things you learn early on in detailing is that it’s far more complicated than simply washing a car and then waxing it to get the best results.  You have to wash.  Then clay, then polish, then maybe a glaze, then possibly a sealant, then top with a wax. That’s a lot of different products to use, and all can react differently depending on the product used before or after them, or the surface they are going on. For instance, my car has a metallic paint color.  Some waxes are designed to bring out the metallic flakes in the paint, others are designed to make them less noticeable or ‘mute’ them. I want a wax that makes the flakes ‘pop’.

So for me, it would be great if I could have an expert at Poorboys evaluate my car’s paint, take into account the look I want, and give me advice on the products I should use to get the results I want.  So for me, cash isn’t that important as a form of compensation.  Instead, I would rather have custom advice/education on how best to detail my car to get the look I want.

One of the best ways to not only compensate ambassadors but also make the program more attractive to them, is to focus on providing benefits associated with how and why they are using your products. In the Poorboys example, I use their products to protect my car’s paint, and make it look better. So a key benefit I would be interested in from a Poorboys brand ambassador program would be if the brand could provide me custom advice/education on how I can better select detailing products for my vehicle. If they could teach me how to be a better detailer, that would benefit me, and it would also ultimately lead to me buying more Poorboys products.

Here’s another example. Let’s say your company sells lawncare products. If you had a brand ambassador programs, a benefit you could provide those ambassadors could be custom workshops or webinars that would teach the ambassadors how to create a more beautiful lawn. By teaching the homeowners a skill associated with your products, you’re not only providing a benefit to the ambassadors, but you’re also teaching them how to create a more beautiful lawn, which makes them happier, and also makes them a stronger advocate for your products!

So as you can see, by compensating your ambassadors with benefits associated with your products, you not only make them more passionate about your brand and products, but you save money! It’s literally a win-win for both your brand and its ambassadors!

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How to Create a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program

Creating a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program

This post on 10 Thing to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program remains one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written. So to start off the new year, I wanted to do a deeper dive into the topic of creating and launching a successful brand ambassador program, and walk you through the process from the brand’s point of view.

So where do you start? How do you measure results? How do you choose your ambassadors? How do you integrate the program with your other marketing and sales functions? We’ll get into all that in this post, so read on…

First, I have to say of all the consulting work I do, helping companies build out brand ambassador programs is probably the most fulfilling. I love the challenge of creating a plan that’s going to help companies better build relationships with their most passionate customers. It’s so rewarding to know that you’re helping to build something that will greatly help the brand, but even more importantly, that will provide a much better product and experience for the customer.

If I were going to work with your company to help you build a world-class brand ambassador program, this would be the process:

Plan Your Brand Ambassador Program; How Does the Brand Benefit, and How Will Your Ambassadors Benefit?

Related: How to Incorporate Millennials Into Your Brand Ambassador Program

At a high level, your brand needs to ask and answer two questions when you start fleshing out your brand ambassador program:

  1. Who is our ideal brand ambassador?
  2. What relationship will we have with our ambassadors?

To further expand on the second point, you want to as clearly as possible detail how your brand benefits from an ambassador program, and how your ambassadors will benefit.

The benefits to both your brand and its ambassadors need to be clearly defined, and very obvious and desirable to both parties. Too many brands can clearly point to what they want to accomplish with an ambassador program, but they struggle to detail meaningful benefits to the ambassadors if they participate. This is why it’s so key to create solid benefits to the ambassadors. You want your ambassadors to be thrilled to join, in fact you want so many customers applying to be ambassadors that you could never accept them all.

Think of it this way: Let’s say you want to launch a brand ambassador program because you want to increase sales of a particular product line by 20%. That’s a pretty heavy lift that you’re asking of those ambassadors, so you have to do some heavy lifting of your own and make it worth the ambassador’s while to join and then be committed to acting in a way that will help you realize that 20% increase in sales.

The more clearly defined and OBVIOUS the benefits you offer ambassadors, the more likely they will be to want to join your program and help your program reach its goals.

    Benefits - Ambassadors

  • Salary
  • Greater Access to Brand
  • Early Access to New Products
  • Recognition and Promotion
  • Professional and Personal Development

          Benefits - Brand

  • Increased Sales
  • Increased Promotion
  • Product Feedback
  • Customer Feedback

As far as measuring and tracking results: Clearly define what your goals are for your brand ambassador program. Maybe you want to increase sales, or decrease calls to customer service centers, or improve customer sentiment online. Start with your core goal, then clearly define precisely what you want to see happen.  The more precise you are with your goals, the more accountable everyone will be for reaching them.  Don’t just say ‘increase sales’, say ‘increase sales by 8% for the first year of the brand ambassador program’. And your KPIs will flow from your goals and desired outcomes.

An additional note about goal-setting: Don’t be afraid to regularly revisit your goals and measurement tactics to make sure you’re on a realistic course. This is especially important during the first year of your brand ambassador program. Self-audit frequently, at least every 3 months, monthly is better for the first 6 months. There will be a lot of trial and error involved in launching your brand ambassador program at all levels. Be mindful of this, and don’t be afraid to change course if something isn’t working as expected.

Your Brand Ambassador Program Needs Internal Ambassadors

Before you do anything else as far as fleshing out your brand ambassador program, you need to know who will own it and who will fight for it internally. Ideally, you want more than one person who are customer-centric, and who can clearly communicate to their bosses the value of the brand ambassador program, especially in the early days when a direct impact on the business bottom line will be harder to quantify. These will be the people that understand how a brand ambassador program will benefit their brand, but they can also envision how such a program will improve the product and brand experience for the ambassadors, and all customers.

Your Brand Ambassador Program Should ALWAYS Be Integrated Into Your Existing Marketing, Sales and Customer Service Efforts

The quickest way to ensure that your brand ambassador program fails is to put it on an island within your organization. Left by itself, a brand ambassador program could take years to see measurable results that justify its cost. At best. Few companies will be willing to invest the money necessary to reach that point. The good news is that a brand ambassador program can begin benefiting your company almost immediately, if structured correctly.

A well-designed brand ambassador program will directly impact and positively affect most of the core functions of your business:

  • Marketing: Ambassadors will help promote your products to other customers
  • Sales: Ambassadors will drive new sales
  • Customer Service: Ambassadors will interact directly with customers both online and off, addressing their concerns and answering their questions.
  • PR: Ambassadors will not only spread positive news about your company, they will also proactively defend it against trolls and attacks.
  • Product Design: Ambassadors will collect valuable product feedback directly from customers, which your company can then implement to improve product design.

Think of it this way; You’re not reinventing the wheel by launching a brand ambassador program. As my friend Kelly Hungerford says, a well-designed brand ambassador program makes everything your company is already doing, work better.

Kelly Hungerford

" A well-designed brand ambassador program makes everything your company is already doing, work better."


Start Small, Grow Big

For most companies, the idea of launching a brand ambassador program is a completely new initiative. There’s a steep learning curve involved at first, and much of the process will honestly be trial and error in the first days. To minimize the expense and improve efficiency, it makes sense to start with a smaller core group of ambassadors. The idea is that you want to iron out the kinks with a smaller group, then once you’ve got the process nailed (and you’re seeing the results you want), then you can branch out with a larger group.

For example, if you are targeting single moms, maybe start out with a group of say 5 or 10 ambassadors, and over time as you develop your program, you can scale it out to 100 or even 1,000 single moms. If you want your brand ambassador program to drive sales at your retail locations, maybe focus on only your San Jose market at launch, with the idea being to eventually branch out into a national program.

Create Channels to Directly Connect Your Ambassadors to Each Other, and Your Brand

This can be something as simple as a Facebook or LinkedIn group or a Twitter group DM or a Slack channel.  Also, you want to have the brand representatives that they will be working with regularly present and active in these groups as well.

Why this is important:

  • It gives your ambassadors a place where they can get to know each other
  • It gives your ambassadors a place where they can share ideas, bounce questions off each other and get help
  • It gives your brand a place where they can directly communicate with your ambassadors
  • It gives your brand the ability to quickly and easily collect feedback from your ambassadors
  • It communicates to your ambassadors that you take their feedback and connection seriously, which further motivates them to be more active

Beyond this group, you want to ensure that your ambassadors have as much direct access to your brand representatives as possible, as often as they need it.  Let’s say one of your ambassadors is ‘in the field’ and talking to a potential customer about your product. The customer is considering purchasing your product, and asks a technical question that your ambassador doesn’t know the answer to. If your ambassador had a way to message a brand rep and quickly get that information, it could result in an easy sale. This works regardless of how you will be using your ambassadors and across many core functions such as sales, PR, customer service, customer feedback, etc.

Collect and UTILIZE Feedback From Your Ambassadors

No matter what your working relationship is with your ambassadors, you should always focus on how you can empower your ambassadors to do a better job of collecting feedback from the customers they interact with, and from the ambassadors themselves. There’s a couple of key reasons for this:

  1. Think of the feedback collected from your ambassadors as being free market research. They will interact directly with current and potential customers, and get unfiltered product and brand feedback. The ambassadors will also have their own feedback to provide.
  2. Current and potential customers are more likely to give HONEST feedback to an ambassador than to your brand. Your ambassador will, for the most part, be viewed as just another customer by the people they talk to, so those people will let their guard down and give unfiltered feedback. That feedback may be more critical, but it will also be honest, and it will tell your brand exactly what it needs to do to win that customer’s business.

Your brand’s ability to collect and utilize feedback from its ambassadors is one of the biggest benefits from launching a brand ambassador program. The feedback your ambassadors collect from other customers aids your marketing, PR, customer service, and even product design. It’s invaluable, and a core tenet of your ambassador program should be to design it so that a premium is placed on collecting customer feedback.

All Your Ambassadors MUST Be Compensated

Whenever I talk to companies about compensating ambassadors, I stress two points to them:

  1. All your ambassadors MUST be compensated
  2. Paying them with cash should be your last option

Let’s take a closer look at each point.  First, you must compensate your ambassadors. The level of involvement and work you’re asking of ambassadors is about the same as a part-time job. By compensating your ambassadors, you are communicating to them that you value and appreciate their hard work, and that you aren’t taking it for granted. This keeps them motivated to work hard on your brand’s behalf. On the other hand, if you don’t compensate your ambassadors, they feel as if you are taking advantage of them and their time. Because you would be.

On the other hand, you should only compensate your ambassadors with cash if there are no other options. Paying ambassadors with cash frames their work as being a job. You don’t want the ambassador’s involvement to be viewed as work, you want it to be viewed as an act of love. They love your brand, and they want to work in a way to help grow and foster it.

So if you take cash off the table, how do you compensate your ambassadors? I always tell clients that cash should be the last option and ACCESS should be the first. Give your ambassadors better access to your brand and its products. Let them talk directly with the people that bring their favorite products to market. Let them have a first-look at new products, before even the press gets a chance to review them. In fact, in many ways giving ambassadors early access to new products can be a simple extension of what your brand is already doing with reaching out to the press to let journalists review your products early before they hit the market.  Treat your ambassadors as special people, because they are. Give them early access to products, give them tours of your facility, let them talk directly to the product and brand managers that help bring their favorite products directly to market.

And above all, ask your ambassadors how you can make their involvement worth their while. You will be amazed, but one of the best ways you can compensate ambassadors is to give them better access to your brand, and to take their suggestions seriously. Listening to your most passionate customers and ACTING on their feedback is one of the best ways you can reward them.

To be honest, simply paying ambassadors is pretty lazy. If that’s your best idea for compensating your ambassadors, then you really don’t know them very well. Go back to the drawing board till you come up with a better idea.

Don’t Just Read This Post, Act on it 

Too many people will read this post, think it’s a great idea to launch a brand ambassador program, then do nothing about it.

Yes, it’s a lot of work.

Yes, it may be hard to convince your boss to commit to it.

Yes, it will take a lot of time.

But the bottom line is, your customers are worth every bit of it. A well-run ambassador program is one of the greatest competitive advantages your brand can have. And as a brand employee, there’s nothing more satisfying than working directly every day with customers that genuinely LOVE your brand.

That’s what you get to do if your brand runs an ambassador program.  Start today, building the case internally for launching a brand ambassador program. Analyze your business, and detail all the ways that a brand ambassador program could positively impact your bottom line.  Scroll back up to the section on integrating your brand ambassador program as I’ve already given you the list.

Create a proposal for a brand ambassador program and present it to your boss.  Don’t position as ‘this is what it will cost us’, instead present it as ‘here’s how our brand will benefit’.  At worst, a well-run brand ambassador program should pay for itself.  At best, it will be a huge competitive advantage for your business.

Besides all of that, you are creating something amazing for your customers. You are creating a vehicle that allows your brand to not only get a better sense of who your customers are and what they think, but that also takes that customer feedback and IMPLEMENTS it and utilizes it within your brand.

And if you need help making the case to your boss and creating your plan, feel free to email me.  I’ll be happy to answer any question you have about creating a brand ambassador program, even if we don’t work together on it. I’ll be happy to help you get started, no strings attached, just reach out and I’ll be happy to help answer any general questions you have.

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How to Incorporate Millennials Into Your Brand Ambassador Program

Using Millennials as Brand Ambassadors
Want to know how much it will cost to create a Brand Ambassador Program for your company? Check out Mack’s Rate Sheet.

In many ways, millennials are ideal for most Brand Ambassador Programs given who they are, how they communicate, and where their passions lie.  The starting point for the group defined as millennials is generally considered to be anyone born in ‘the early 1980s’, and most sources put the end-point for this age group as being 18-20 years later.  So for the purposes of this article, I’ll call millennials anyone between the ages of 15-35 in 2017.

Before we talk about how to incorporate millennials into your Brand Ambassador Program, let’s look at some of the key qualities and characteristics that define this group of people:

Millennials are digitally savvy: Millennials have used computers and digital devices for most of, if not their entire lives. Additionally, millennials are the first generation to grow up with a robust internet available to them. Millennials are quite comfortable with and even expect digital experiences in many if not all forms of communication.

Millennials thrive off connecting with others: Millennials as a group are definitely extroverted, they seek out communication with others, especially within their same age group. This is slightly in contrast to their older siblings who are members of Generation X (who may also be their bosses), as that group tends to be more self-reflective and values solitude more than millennials. Keep this in mind if there are no millennials involved in the planning of your brand ambassador efforts if you want to attract millennials to your program.

Millennials have a highly-tuned bullshit sensor when it comes to advertising: Having grown up with the internet and social media, they’ve also grown up with a lot of bad advertising. They are naturally weary of anything the ‘smells’ like advertising. On the flipside, they prize authenticity.   They view open and honest communication as a show of respect for them, and this improves brand loyalty and attraction for millennials.

Millennials support causes that benefit their communities and the planet on local, national and global levels: One thing that I think is quite impressive about millennials is that they are passionate about problems they view within their communities, but they are also more than willing to play an active role in working to solve those problems. They are very giving of their time to help support causes that they believe in, and that speaks to their credit. Keep this in mind when you move to fleshing out how millennials will be compensated within the structure of your Brand Ambassador Program.

 

Related: 10 Things to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program

 

So when you are fleshing out how millennials can be a part of your Brand Ambassador Program, you want to factor in the above qualities that define this group. Let’s look at the role you should ask millennials to perform as Brand Ambassadors, how you can best engage them, and finally, discuss the best ways to compensate them.

How Should You Ask Millennials to Act As Brand Ambassadors? When a brand launches an ambassador program, one of the first strategies is to attempt to leverage the Brand Ambassador Program as a vehicle to drive new sales. There are many other ways to leverage a Brand Ambassador Program (as a way to drive customer feedback, as a way to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, to help with product design), but driving sales is often a logical starting point, since budgets for Brand Ambassador Programs are often justified by the promise of new sales generated.

Yet when we consider working with millennials as our Brand Ambassadors, we need to factor in the unique qualities that define this group when deciding on the type of relationship we want and expect of them.  In short, we need to remember that:

  • Millennials are very wary of advertising messages
  • Millennials prize authenticity
  • Millennials are very engaging, especially with other millennials
  • Millennials are quite comfortable with the internet and digital tools

So for example, if you want millennials to work to drive sales as part of your Brand Ambassador Program, you need to tailor your efforts to incorporate the qualities that define millennials. Case in point, we know that millennials are very wary of advertising messages and that they prize authenticity. Using these together, if you ask your Brand Ambassadors who are millennials to sell to other millennials, you have to be willing to let them do so in a way that will make sense to them as millennial Brand Ambassadors, but also to the other millennials they will be talking to. For example, since millennials prize authenticity, you have to give your millennial Brand Ambassadors the freedom to openly discuss what they like AND dislike about your brand. It might seem scary to have your Brand Ambassadors out there openly discussing what they dislike about your brand, but if they are speaking to millennials (and many other age groups, for that manner), this will actually improve their ability to sell to those millennials.  In short, regardless of how you want your Brand Ambassadors to act on your brand’s behalf, you have to consider how they can most comfortably help your brand reach its goals.

 

How Should You Engage Millennial Brand Ambassadors? Two of the defining qualities of millennials is that they thrive off open communication, and they prize authenticity. So this means when engaging your millennial Brand Ambassadors, you want to give them as much honest communication and information as possible about your Brand Ambassador Program and how you want to work with them. Give them a thorough knowledge of what your Brand Ambassador Program is, what you are hoping to accomplish, and talk to them about how you want to work with them. If millennials have a sense that their opinions are valued and respected, and they feel as if they have a sense of ownership over the Brand Ambassador Program, they will be more invested in seeing it succeed. This willingness to honestly engage the millennials you are working with also speaks to their love of authenticity, which will appeal to them and help them become more invested in your efforts.

Also, keep in mind that millennials are also very comfortable with digital and social media tools. So another option could be to create an online portal, forum or group where Brand Ambassadors could connect with each other and share tips and ideas.  Also, you could have the brand’s management be involved with this group, so that the Brand Ambassador’s best ideas could be pitched directly to the brand, and quickly incorporated into the program. This incorporating of ideas from millennial members also helps them become more invested in the Brand Ambassador Program itself, as it send the strong message to the millennial ambassadors that their opinions are valued, and will be acted upon.

 

How Do Your Millennial Brand Ambassadors Want to Be Compensated? I’ve always said that your Brand Ambassadors should absolutely be compensated for their efforts. There’s a big time commitment involved, and everyone deserves to be compensated for their time. However, money is not the only way to compensate Brand Ambassadors, and only compensating with money has ramifications. I see many Brand Ambassador Programs that only focus on leveraging Brand Ambassadors as salespeople, and they are compensated with commissions on their sales. The potential problem with this approach is that it frames every customer interaction a Brand Ambassador has a sales-interaction only. The Brand Ambassador is typically only interested in completing a sale, and isn’t as interested in any customer feedback that might be collected, and which is often far more valuable than completing an individual sale.

Now that I’m off that soapbox, let’s look at how to compensate your millennial Brand Ambassadors. Having said all the above, I still think it’s fine to compensate millennial Brand Ambassadors with cash, but I also think other forms of compensation should be considered. For example, we know that millennials thrive on open communication, and they love authenticity. Keeping this in mind, you could adopt the rock star mentality and give your millennial Brand Ambassadors special access ‘behind the scenes’ at their favorite brand.  Give them special access to the marketing team, or to product development.  Let them know about upcoming products or initiatives that the general public doesn’t know about or that won’t know about for months.

Also, feel free to tap into their natural love of being active in their communities. For example, if a brand like North Face launched a Brand Ambassador Program with millennials as members, it might want to have a special Beach Cleanup Day just for its Brand Ambassadors.  An initiative such as this would be a way to not only reward millennial Brand Ambassadors, but also give them a way to improve their local community, which taps into their desire to be invested in helping locally. Perhaps this event could be made open to the public and even used as a sort of membership drive as a way for the existing millennial Brand Ambassadors to meet other millennials who would want to help clean the beach, but who may also become interested in learning more about joining North Face’s Brand Ambassador Program.

 

So there’s some ideas for how you can work with millennials in your Brand Ambassador Program. Since this group has already become the largest generation, working with them is no longer an option, it’s now reality. As with any solid Brand Ambassador Program, think about how your brand benefits from the program, and think about how your ambassadors (in this case millennials) will benefit.

Find a win-win situation for both your brand and your ambassadors, and your Brand Ambassador Program will be a success.

BONUS: Here’s this post in video form to make it even easier to share with your team:

UPDATE: Here’s an example of company brand ambassador programs that leverage millennials as members:

Red Bull’s Wings Team: This group of ambassadors (or ‘Student Marketeers’) mostly includes people who are deemed popular and influential within their local communities.  Members are involved in ‘activations’ involving the Red Bull drink, typically more than a simple product demonstration.  These can involve elaborate stunts such as ‘air drops’ or slipping free Red Bull into classrooms or in vending machines for free. The main goal is to connect with college students as these are also millennials.

 

 

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A Quick Overview of Lenny and Larry’s Brand Ambassador Program

Lenny and Larry's cookies brand ambassador programI am constantly looking for nutritional snacks and such for when I travel. I am an extremely picky eater, plus I had my gall bladder removed a few years ago, and if I don’t eat regularly, it can cause headaches and slight nausea. So having tasty and ideally nutritious snacks while traveling is a must for me.

About a year ago I discovered Lenny and Larry’s nutritional cookies. The problem with most ‘nutritional’ cookies or bars is that they taste terrible. Lenny and Larry’s cookies actually aren’t that bad, in fact they taste great when compared to similar products. Additionally, they are very easy to digest, with a great protein to fat ratio.  Each cookie (4 oz) is massive and enough for 2 servings, with 6 grams of fat per serving and 8 grams of protein.

Needless to say, The Complete Cookie is now my go-to snack when traveling. So the other day when I was on their site, I noticed they have a page that explains their brand ambassador program. I want to review their program because I know a lot of you are curious as to what a brand ambassador program looks like ‘in the wild’.

Before I discuss Lenny and Larry’s brand ambassador program, I wanted to review some of the key elements that a good brand ambassador program will have:

1 – A process for helping ambassadors better sell your products to the potential customers they will interact with regularly.  This could be coupon codes or samples that ambassadors can share with potential customers to encourage a purchase.

2 – A process for letting ambassadors collect and share product feedback from their interactions with potential customers, as well as their own product feedback. This is especially beneficial for letting ambassadors share feedback from potential customers on why they don’t currently buy your brand or its products.

3 – A way for ambassadors to directly communicate and connect with each other around shared ideas and beliefs that are core to them, that also relate to your brand and its products. For example, if your company makes cooking utensils, it might be a good idea to create a message board that unites ambassadors around the idea of cooking.

 

Based on what I see on this page, Lenny and Larry’s brand ambassador program is focused on having its members drive sales.  Period. There’s also a passing mention of driving digital WOM with the #TeamLL hashtag, but it’s obvious that the main focus of the program is additional sales.

From the page:

“Our Brand Ambassador program is our way of saying thank you.

Every ambassador gets a personalized landing page with a unique URL. Every time someone purchases after following your tracking link, you are handsomely rewarded. The more you promote, the more benefits you’ll receive.

Rewards:

Free cookies
Monthly discount codes
Official Lenny & Larry’s swag
$$ Commissions $$ (extra income)”

Which is a good start. A solid brand ambassador program should absolutely make it easier for its members to generate new sales from the potential customers they will interact with. However, if the main/only focus of the program is to encourage members to sell products, it can create problems. For one, the members will start to have sales-oriented interactions with potential customers, as you see here:

So let’s say that I am a fan of Lenny and Larry’s, but not interested in becoming an incentivized salesperson for the brand.  In this case, it appears the program doesn’t offer much for me. Here are some things I’d like to see added to the program (and to be fair, Lenny and Larry’s could be offering some or all of these elements now, but I don’t see any mention of them on the brand’s website):

1 – A way to directly connect with other brand ambassadors. I would like to see a forum or maybe a private Facebook group or some digital mechanism to let me interact with other members of the program.  Lenny and Larry’s creates healthy snacks so I am sure there are many fans of the brand that also have a lot of knowledge of the brand’s products as well as healthy eating and living that they could share with other members.  This type of knowledge-sharing would benefit all members, as well as bring them closer together.  Which also creates a better experience for the brand ambassadors, and this gives them another reason to be loyal to the brand.

2 – A way to directly connect with the brand and share thoughts and ideas. Think of this as a brand advisory council or similar.  Members no doubt have ideas and opinions on how to improve the program or change it based on their interactions with potential customers.  It would be great if Lenny and Larry’s had a mechanism in place to directly connect the group with the brand. When crafting a brand ambassador program remember that while leveraging ambassadors to drive new sales is important, leveraging their feedback from interactions with other customers can also pay huge dividends.

3 – Give the members early access to new products that are in development. If you’re already a fan of Lenny and Larry’s products, you’ll probably be interested in any new flavors to existing products, or any new products in development.

 

The point here is, if you’re going to create a brand ambassador program, give members multiple ways to participate. Not everyone wants to sell your products, even if they love your brand. Give your ambassadors special access to what’s happening with your brand, and multiple options for how they can participate and extend the relationship with your brand. I think Lenny and Larry’s brand ambassador program is a good start, as long as they are open incorporating new elements, starting with giving existing ambassadors more input into the future of the program.

Having said that, I know how hard it is for the boss to sign off on launching a brand ambassador program without there being a direct impact to sales, so I totally get the focus on attempting to drive sales through existing ambassadors. This is typically one of the first and biggest roadblocks I encounter when working with clients, the boss can only see a brand ambassador program’s value through the lens of how many new sales it will immediately generate. This affects execution and roll-out and if not carefully positioned, can negatively affect the progress of the initiative.

If this post has piqued your interest in launching a brand ambassador program, here’s a bit more information on how to get started creating an amazing brand ambassador program.