A brand is essentially your business’s product or service combined with your unique positioning, basically how you do what you do. All brands stand for something in the consumers eyes, and what your brand stands for is vitally important for the success of your business.

Many of the top brands have brand ambassadors who promote them (for a fee of course) so Beyonce, our star above represents Samsung and Armani among others, while Keira Knightley is the brand ambassador for Chanel, and Jessica Biel for Revlon, to name a few, just to get you in the mood for the blog…

Just to clarify what we’re talking about exactly here – “A brand ambassador is a a well-connected person or a celebrity who is used to promote and advertise a product or service”

Whilst this is clearly true, I’ve been thinking lately that there’d be value in thinking of ourselves as brand ambassadors for our ownbusinesses. The following definition is more inclusive “ a brand ambassador is a representative of an organisation that best portrays the product, service qnd passion of the organisation “

Maybe we don’t all have Beyonce on speed dial, but if you consider the definition of a brand ambassador above, then the scope of your brands ambassadors becomes much larger and spreads and morphs into a variety of audiences, many with the potential to influence others.

Clearly all employees are ambassadors for your shop, if they are saying good things about you and your shop to their network of friends and family, this can bring new customers through the door.

Your customers can be ambassadors for your business if they like what you do and what you stand for. Seth Godin called this the era of conversation marketing, so if your customers like what you do, you’ve pretty much lit the blue touch paper, so you’d do well to stand well back and let them get on with the business of promoting you themselves.

Certain people are just more socially aware, better connected and better at connecting with other people, these are called “influencers” and if you have a customer who’s an influencer who loves your business, you can expect sales to increase because of this connection, in some ways its more like patronage, an old fashioned term, but well used in this context.

Consider that you’re the best ambassador for your brand, as Pierce Brosnan isn’t currently available, we all have to work with what we’ve got !

The key motivation of a brand ambassador is passion (notwithstanding the motivating factor of money of course ) – and as its your business if anyone is passionate about it, then you’re the best person to showcase this trait successfully.

Take a second to work out, or maybe remember, what you’re most passionate about in your business if you’ve never considered this angle before…

Is it the sense of community you love?
Living your dream ?
Empowering others ?
Selling beautiful aspirational things?
Selling everyday useful things?
Providing a service?
Being in the middle of things?
Sourcing amazing products for your shop?
Or something entirely different ?

What’s your passion?

How can you tell everyone about it ?

Tags: brand ambassadors

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under Adding value, brand ambassadors, branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.