In our socially-networked world, Word-of-Mouth marketing is becoming essential. According to a recent Nielsen study, WOM is the most powerful selling tool worldwide. The concept of brand ambassadors, people who evangelize about a product or service, is a great example. While these used to be mainly celebrities hired to do advertisements, these are now everyday people who truly love the brand. In 2004, we helped Cingular create it’s Trend Force, a group of passionate Cingular users between 13 and 21. The program lived online and offered rewards to these ambassadors for getting engaged, and sharing information and feedback with their friends as well as Cingular. Google recruits engineering undergrads on about 80 campuses to be “pizza ambassadors,” buying pies (on Google’s tab) for fellow students during exams. Now Jet Blue has a similar program to promote its cheap fares to college students, launched by Mr. Youth. From Washington Square News:
Yesterday, NYU’s campus representative for JetBlue Airways, SCPS junior Alex Early, hosted an event with prizes including free plane tickets, Dunkin Donuts gift certificates and bags of blue tortilla chips.
Early first got involved with JetBlue when he came across an ad in WSN his freshman year. From there, Early participated in CrewBlue, a program organized by JetBlue that places campus representatives at universities across the country.
At least 700 students stopped by the JetBlue stand outside of Kimmel to try their luck at the raffle, bowling, paper airplane-making and hula-hooping contests.
Student brand ambassadors are the offline equivalent of widgets. Here me out. They are creating branded utility–something useful and fun for their peers to engage with. Friends bring friends, so it also spreads virally. There’s even a rev share component like new social shopping widgets. Of course, brand ambassadors also network online; Early has a facebook groups (natch), JetBlue at NYU.
Of course, student ambassadors need not even be “employed” by a company. Part of youth identity formation is through association with chosen brands, labels, groups, ideas… The entire premise of Facebook’s new advertising platform is based on this sort of pull-engagement, then through networked word-of-mouth. Facebook friends will be able to see, either through badges on their profile or newsfeed stories, what brands their friends like. Early adopters will spread their tastes and finds to the outer spheres of influence. Online and offline, the key to effective marketing is reaching the audience on a 1:1 basis–and feeding them junk food whenever possible.
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