Employees take up role of brand ambassadors

HOW DO you best promote your products, your brands in the market? Simple. Get your employees to experience and talk about your brands. It does yield results, as the Tommy Hilfiger, Motorola, Tata Sky would confirm. Aggressive competition and the need to use multiple channels of communications to reach out to customers, especially in the services-led businesses is pushing companies from mobile phones to apparels to use their employees as brand ambassadors. Be it the Citigroup top executives posing for the company or Pepsico India CEO’s ‘safe cola campaign’, employees are getting into the robes of brand ambassadors for their companies. Take Tommy Hilfiger for instance. The company is using its employees as brand ambassadors to sell its spring summer collection Berkley Rider which was launched on March 1. The employees are sporting a cool and casual look, as the collection is inspired by the university look. There are beauty experts to do their manicure, pedicure, advise on the daytime make-up to give that perfect touch. The company has also roped in hairstylist to give a fresh and casual look complementing the clothes. Tommy Hilfiger, India, CEO Shailesh Chaturvedi elaborates the reason to involve the employees. “They are the most effective medium to promote brands. They are associated with the products and can easily identify and communicate about them.” The collection targeted at the 20-40 age group, has been launched in Bangalore and Hyderabad and will soon be launched in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Chandigarh. The promotion exercise will be carried out in all its stores across the country. A similar example is Tata Sky. It gave free subscriptions of its DTH service to its 2,000-odd employees when it was launched in August-September, 2006. Being a service-led company, this allowed the brand penetration as consumers got a real feel of the service through the employees of Tata Sky and decided to buy the service. Besides this, it also introduced an employee referral programme to promote its Direct-To-Home service wherein the employees were incentivised for increasing the consumer base. It was a great success as 70% of the employees convinced more than one consumer to try the service which they got at a discount. Tata Sky head consumer marketing Vikram Mehra explains the connect, “It works really well for servicesled products. For us, employees acted as sample points where the service could be experienced and the brand value could be enhanced.” It’s a chain reaction, as the employee as a consumer is convinced about the brands and products, they refer it to their peers, friends and neighbours who in turn would do the same, in the process continuously expanding the consumer base. Also, Motorola’s Ambassador programme has been a huge success in this regard. People working in the company are allowed to get Motorola phones at a discount of 10-15% for their families and friends. They can get three phones per quarter. The response has been so huge, that the company has stopped encouraging it. They want more than it’s allowed. Though the concept has existed in some form or the other, the branding aspect is getting attention recently. Says, Motorola, India HR head Raghuram Reddum: “Companies did have such discount schemes earlier but it was more like a benefit for the employees rather a branding exercise. They took pride in getting a product manufactured by their companies but not promote to others.” All this started changing with competition seeping in the country and companies’ realisation of the need to differentiate products.
SALESMEN IN DISGUISE
Tommy Hilfiger is using its employees to sell its spring summer collection Berkley Rider which was launched on March 1 Tata Sky gave free subscriptions of its DTH service to its 2,000-odd employees Under its Ambassador programme, Motorola allowed staffers to get its phones at a 10-15% for their families and friends. The response has been so huge, that the company has stopped encouraging it.



Courtesy: EconomicTimes
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