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Brand Ambassadors

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/at-colleges-the-marketers-are-everywhere.html?pagewanted=all

At college, students explore many things: interests, friendships, beliefs, and brands.  While students may cling to some brands from their pre-college years, often it is in college that students pick brands that they well may pick for the rest of their lives.  As a result, for companies it is crucial to sway college students to view their brand in a positive light. This article describes how companies are realizing that rather than targeting ads at college students, advertising through other college students allows them to gain traction better at universities.  As a result, companies are aiming to attract “popular” students, who have many ties to their college communities (such as members of sororities and fraternities), to advertise their respective company around campus with the goal of reaching as many students as possible.

The companies’ approach to gaining new customers strongly parallels the model of the diffusion of a behavior through a network that we learned about in class.  Namely, if one person in a network of people adopts a product (or in this case, decides to favor a company) then eventually any node in the network could eventually become loyal to a brand as well, given that enough of their friends have become loyal to sway them.  In this situation, it is in the companies’ best interests to attract the popular students, since they have the most links into the network (i.e. friends).  If a popular student can attract enough of his or her friends to the brand, then those friends will all try to attract even more students to the brand.  Eventually, the brand will gather the loyalty of a good chunk of the campus.  Indeed, this seems to be happening in the article;  “[i]t’s easy for the three American Eagle student marketers here to enlist friends via Facebook and campus listservs for the move-in event. In return, the company outfits the volunteers with free T-shirts in navy blue, the corporate color of American Eagle, that read ‘A.E. Move-In Crew.'”  By targeting students through other students, companies are more able to invade college networks and thus gain many more brand-loyal customers.

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