What are the key benefits of brand ambassadorships?

The competition for consumer attention is a never ending battle for marketers.

Whether it’s through colourful content, a proud display of brand values or direct consumer engagement, businesses large and small are forever trying to find ways to stay relevant, tell their brand story and appeal to consumers' desires and passions.

It begs the question - is there a way to achieve all of these objectives in one?

The answer...

Brand ambassadorships.

A brand ambassador is a person, especially a celebrity or sports star, who enters a paid partnership with an organisation to endorse their products or services. Brand ambassadors have become increasingly important in the digital age where trust is harder to gain, and brand perception and credibility is everything.

But, why is using a brand ambassador a good option?

There are six key benefits that a brand ambassador can achieve for your business, each with the ability to make your life as a marketer much easier. These include shortening the length and cost of your branding efforts, supercharging your brand recall, geographical targeting, removing barriers to trust, content creation and customer engagement, and internal capabilities.

By aligning with a star brand ambassador such as a high profile AFL legend or a successful Olympian, you are reducing the need to spend valuable marketing dollars on reach and frequency. This comes about by the ability to piggyback on the ambassador’s pre-existing and ongoing media and social-media presence.

An example of a footy icon is St Kilda legend Nick Riewoldt, the embodiment of loyalty, courage and resilience. Playing over 300 games in a career spanning seventeen years, he has amassed an enormous amount of TV time on the field, interviews off the field, as well as his post-retirement media work. For over two decades, hundreds of thousands of people have watched him play or speak every week. That’s a lot of eyeballs.

The same goes for an Olympic champion like Sally Pearson, a record breaking superstar who carried the hopes of an entire nation on the world’s biggest stage and delivered. Millions of people around the world tuned in to see her win gold at the 2012 London Olympics, for which she became an instant household name in Australia.

Brands and organisations such as NAB, Nature’s Own, and Coles have been able to reduce their need for spending big on reach and frequency by taking advantage of the credibility and awareness that Riewoldt and Pearson have each acquired over the duration of their sporting careers, as well as their continuing media presence afterwards.

Want to see some other great examples of brand ambassadorships? Read more here.

This special ability to leverage a front of mind personality without the need to spend big on reach or frequency is a unique benefit of brand ambassadorships, and leads into the next reason why brand ambassadors can be so helpful for business...

The positive associations that consumers will make between an ambassador and your brand will supercharge your brand recall.

Brand recall is also referred to as ‘unaided awareness’, and relates to the ability of a consumer to correctly generate a brand from memory when prompted by a product or a category.

Think about the instant connection consumers make between brands like Nike with NBA superstar LeBron James, Coles with celebrity chef Curtis Stone, or Fujitsu Air Conditioning and Australian cricket legend Mark Taylor.

Humans are hardwired to associate one thing to another in their minds, and having a recognisable face and a trusted name associated with your brand is the ultimate way to boost brand recall.

One of the inherent benefits of a brand ambassadorship is the ability to utilise a star’s profile in order to target certain geographical market segments.

The basis of this stems from the where and what: where the ambassador is based, and what the ambassador is known for. Once you’ve determined who and where your audience is, then you can narrow down the brand ambassador to suit these specifications.

If a particular star is known internationally or is a nationally recognised figure like Sally Pearson, marketers could use them for a broader campaign targeting a wider audience. However, a star like Nick Riewoldt who is known more in certain pockets of the country can still be effectively leveraged when targeted to these pockets of influence.

A great representation of this is provided by the “Barassi Line”, an imaginary line that divides Australia between its preferred code of football, Australian rules or rugby league/union.

According to this geographic principle, if a business is looking to target Australia’s southern and western states (Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia) with a sporting brand ambassador, the logical decision would be to build a relationship with an AFL star specific to each state to endorse their product.

On the other hand, someone looking to target the eastern states of Queensland and New South Wales (where rugby league and rugby union are the prevailing football codes) would be better served by teaming up with a rugby league or rugby union star.

Read here to see how Melbourne based hair growth specialists ‘Gro’ were able to penetrate the NSW/QLD market by teaming up with rugby dual-code legend Mat Rogers.

In our information age and ever digitalising world, being able to trust those from whom we buy is becoming increasingly important. As consumers continue to wise up on some of the more invasive methods that companies use to target their customer base - such as the storage of personal data - marketers are being forced to find alternative methods to target and gain the trust of their customer bases.

Want to know how this is being done? Read our 2021 whitepaper on how to achieve marketing cut-through in a post-cookie world.

Brand ambassadors are able to act as a bridge between marketers and their customers. A celebrity ambassador can serve as a familiar and trustworthy face to communicate brand values through their own stories and passions.

A brand ambassador’s ability to transfer their relevant experience, knowledge and credibility onto a product or service is a priceless asset for a marketer, dismantling key barriers to customer trust that a company would otherwise face.

Today’s market is flooded with a never ending flow of content, each piece vying to be more attention grabbing than the last in the fight for consumer eyeballs and mental real estate. But a well leveraged brand ambassadorship provides the unique opportunity to create engaging and meaningful content over a longer period for consumers to interact with.

Partnering with a brand ambassador allows you to communicate your brand’s values through the star’s own story. This can work in one of two ways: an ambassador’s story could be already very well known, and tied together with your brand story can elicit a sense of pre-existing trust and understanding between consumers and your brand. Alternatively, the star’s story could be fresh and untold, meaning you can capitalise on being able to proceed on your narrative journey’s together.

By working closely with a brand ambassador on engaging content, you are able to provide prospective or existing customers an exclusive insight into the previously untold lives of their heroes. And by allowing the star to contribute during the ideation stage, you can create more authentic content, a stronger relationship with your brand ambassador and the opportunity for more content in the long term.

In recent years, new and innovative methods of customer engagement such as gamification, competitions, and other virtual experiences have highlighted the power of effectively reaching your target market, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when in-person engagements haven’t been viable.

When customers partake in fun and engaging marketing activities centred around trusted brand ambassadors, they are more likely to impart their positive associations of the star onto your brand, and joyfully slide their way down the marketing funnel from awareness, consideration, and conversion into loyalty and advocacy.

Aside from the various external benefits discussed above, having a famous face or trusted name associated with you can also provide a range of unique internal benefits to your brand.

This can occur in-house through a brand’s ability to leverage a star at a key meeting and use their sway to positively influence the outcome, or simply just to indicate that the brand is investing its marketing and believes in its product.

Another internal benefit of a brand ambassador is the ability to market for the best staff, giving your business an edge over competitors by enticing prospective employees with the chance to regularly interact with their favourite stars at work meetings and social events.

Think a brand ambassador might be right for your business? Or just want to understand more about how a brand ambassadorship works?

Pickstar’s dedicated Brand Partnerships team is here to help you.

As Pickstar's Chief Growth Officer, Loren Renton has worked with some of the biggest brands in Australia and around the globe.

His experience building and leading cross functional teams to achieve exceptional growth across technology, product, UX, marketing, commercial, sales, CX and business development has provided him hold a holistic understanding of the field, whether you're a start-up, scale up, or industry giant.

With a raft of A-list contacts across sports, entertainment and business, from Hugh Jackman to Shaquille O'Neal, Loren has been leveraged by global sports & entertainment properties, professional athletes (& their agents) & professional sports teams across APAC, USA and UK for a wide range of commercial opportunities.