Brand Ambassador Identification & Selection for Small Business

Today I am going to start a series of articles on identification and selection of brand ambassador where I will discuss various methods that are used in present day marketing arena to leverage secondary brand associations.

This article is dealing with the method of Q rating/score a common method used by marketers to identify and select the best brand ambassador to leverage secondary associations of a brand.

Before getting into details, first let me give you some solid reasons as to why do we need Brand Ambassadors in the first place.

Reasons: why you need Brand Ambassador

1.   According to a study, on average one in five marketing campaigns in US and one in four marketing campaigns in UK, includes brand ambassadors. While globally one in every five marketing campaigns includes brand ambassadors.⁽¹⁾

Considering the above facts, it is quite reasonable to say that due to immense competition and resulting homogeneity of products/services, brands are involved in leveraging secondary brand associations to differentiate their brands from the rest.

2.   Another study suggests that contracting a well known personality as brand ambassador enhances product/service credibility, increases customer attention and results in higher recall of a brand. ⁽²⁾

Considering the above benefits it is reasonable to say that having a well known personality attached to your brand you can not only differentiate your brand but can also attain customer attention, higher recall rate and credibility for your brand.

3.   Over one million businesses starts in the USA alone that excludes online startups. ⁽³⁾ And out of those one million around 134,139 patents are issued roughly to the same number of businesses (134,139) while the rest of the businesses are essentially “Me-Too’s (product/service)” numbering around 866,000 businesses. ⁽⁴⁾  And out of all those patents around 0.1 percent are profitable. ⁽⁵⁾

What this all means is that there is immense competition going on, around 114  businesses starting up each hour in USA alone (not to mention that Worldwide macro, small, medium businesses were 125 million in 132 economies back in 2010 ⁽⁶⁾) and considering the profitability of patents issued, one can easily deduce that majority of those businesses are exactly the same as others or me-too's.

Which means increase in competition (114 every hour), increase in customer choice, shrinking profits, shrinking market and you have not much to differentiate your brand from the rest.

If you guys remember, quite some time back I wrote couple of articles on branding, When and How to Brand Effectively etc, so this article is somewhat related to those articles, the difference is now we are focusing on the importance, relevance, significance of Brand Ambassadors.

4.   Similarly advances in technology, that has resulted in an easy access to foreign markets,  resulted in complex and far more sophisticated business practices, all of which has resulted in a well known global yet local market called “Global Business Village” ⁽⁷⁾.
And that’s why we see businesses coming from everywhere challenging the already present value producers (in the markets), threatening their market share, customer base etc etc.

In wake of all these facts, it is reasonable to say that one can’t differentiate their brand from the rest by focusing just on the primary brand associations.

So ? Any Ideas ?!!!

Like I said focusing just on primary brand associations would not help, a business has to focus on secondary brand associations and one way to do that is by contracting well known personalities for your brand as brand ambassadors.

In this article I am going to focus on use of Q score method ⁽⁸⁾, as tool to identify the best and right individuals for a brand ambassador position. So let’s start with the first step. That is identification of the best individual for your brand as brand ambassador.

Identification of the Best Brand Ambassador by Q Score Method

What you need to do is to identify all the potential individuals for your brand, once you identify all the potential individuals for your brand. Then you need to conduct a simple research.

Yes! Really simple ;) all you need to do is to ask your target market, if they know about individual X (individual X here is one among many you identified and selected as the potential individuals).

Simply ask the following two questions

1.    If they know about the individual

If the answer is Yes then ask the second question.

2.   If that individual is one of their favorite by giving them the following choices.

A. One of my favorites.   B. Very Good   C. Good   D. Fair   E. Poor   F. Never heard of.

Now you will get a certain percentage (for instance 53%) of people (from your target market) who would say yes they know that individual and similarly certain percentage (for instance 26%) of people (from your target market) who would say that the individual is one of their favorite or they are big fans of that individual.

To calculate the q score, all you have to do is to divide the percentage of people who identified the individual as their favorite one over percentage of people who said that they know the individual. Drop the decimal and you got your Q Score J!

You will get a q score for individual X

Q  Score for individual X= 26/53

Q Score for individual X = .49057

Q Score for individual X = 49

You would need to do the same procedure for all of the potential individuals you have identified. Once you get all the Q scores by following the above method, the next step is then to choose the most viable individual for your brand. The higher the Q score of an individual the better candidate he/she is for your brand.

That’s it, in the next article I will be picking up another method possibly “Davie Brown Index” so keep visiting and keep learning the practical side of marketing. J

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References:

1.     Halonen-Knight, E. and Hurmerinta, L. (2010), “Who endorses whom? Meaning transfer in celebrity endorsement”, Journal of               Product & Brand Management, Vol. 19 No. 6, pp. 452-60.2.        Majumdar, R. (2010), Consumer Behaviour – Insights from Indian Market, Phi Learning Private Ltd, New Delhi.

3.     Small Business by the Numbers (Washington DC: Small Business Administration, 2004).

4.     .http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/cst_all.htm

5.     Tomina Edmark, “On Your Mark…” Entrepreneur.com http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/17564-5.

6.     http://www.ifc.org/msmecountryindicators

7.   London, T. and Hart, S.L. (2004), “Reinventing strategies for emerging markets: beyond the transitional       model”, Journal of International Business Studies, Vol. 35 No. 5, pp. 350-370.

8.     Bialik, Carl. "The Numbers Behind Modern Star Search". TheWall Street Journal. Retrieved 19 September 2013.