The Rise of Brand Ambassadors as a Marketing Strategy to Enhance Diffusion
The article linked above by Forbes Magazine discusses the advantages of incorporating brand ambassadors into a company’s marketing strategy. Brand ambassadors are social media influencers that collaborate with businesses to advertise their products or services to followers. These designated spokespeople help accelerate the growth of a new business by boosting brand presence and ultimately, generating sales or attracting new users. The article then details the various considerations that are important when choosing brand ambassadors. This includes identifying the company’s target audiences and finding individuals with close ties in those specific communities. In addition, the number as well as the diversity of brand ambassadors should be continuously expanded in order to create and increase momentum into multiple markets.
This article relates to our class discussion on diffusion effects and how network structure can impact the spread of innovation. The cascade in usage triggered by the introduction of new technology is often bounded by a critical value. This value represents the minimum fraction of an individual’s friends that must choose to adopt the new technology in order for that individual to switch as well. Since the behavior of neighbors impacts the choices of the individual themselves, tightly connected clusters of people represent an obstacle for a new technology that is attempting to infiltrate from the outside. The diffusion of innovation will stop once it reaches that dense, tight-knit cluster unless one of the individuals within that community is directly persuaded to switch behaviors. For example, a product that is promoted by a famous athlete on social media is likely to gain popularity among that particular player’s fanbase. However, the rise in the product’s usage may stop after reaching all fans in that particular cluster because other members of the sports community are fans of an athlete on an opposing team – and thus, belong to a different dense cluster.
The advice in the Forbes article aligns with the idea of dense clusters as an obstacle to diffusion by advising businesses to focus on finding individuals with a strong presence in each of their specific target audiences. Furthermore, the article emphasizes the importance of growing the number and diversity of brand ambassadors. This ensures that a business is able to infiltrate multiple, densely-clustered groups and to continue to build the momentum of their marketing campaign by mitigating against the stop in information spread that occurs at boundaries between two dense clusters. In other words, by recruiting a wide range of spokespeople that are closely connected to a wide range of groups on social media, the diffusion of innovation will begin and spread from various points in the network, maximizing the business’ marketing reach across multiple segments of their target audience.
Personally, I have seen this marketing strategy at play in the real world with the emergence of university brand ambassador programs, particularly run by companies that target young people. Under these university programs, companies recruit a set of individuals from various colleges to help promote a particular product or service on their respective campus. Examples of this include the dating sites Tinder and Bumble. In 2016, Bumble began the Bumble Honey Program which specifically hires enrolled university students to perform marketing activities that promote the app among their peers. Similarly, Tinder launched the Tinder U Ambassador Program in 2018 to recruit student representatives that are responsible for advertising the app on their campuses as well as online on their social media platforms. This marketing strategy applies the idea of diffusion effects because students often form tight-knit communities centered around the college they attend. As a result, the use of a new technology may become widespread on one campus yet fail to spread among college students as a whole. By hiring brand ambassadors from multiple universities, companies like Bumble and Tinder are able to overcome barriers to the spread of their product and more effectively build momentum around their product.