While recently enjoying breakfast at the\u00a0Brickhouse Cafe\u00a0in SoMa (definitely check it out if you live in San Francisco) I couldn\u2019t help but notice a TV advertisement for a local interior\u00a0design\u00a0company specializing in\u00a0porcelain.<\/p>\n
The designs and visuals for the company looked fine. I honestly can\u2019t remember the name of the brand.\u00a0What I do remember, though, is that about halfway through the ad appeared a player for a local football team endorsing the brand. I remember it, because it was\u00a0absurd. It is basically a non sequitur for a football player to endorse a tile company \u2013 the two haven\u2019t the faintest thing to do with each other.<\/p>\n
And yet this tactic doesn\u2019t happen in isolation: I recall seeing something similar when I lived in South Florida with a local quarterback (perhaps\u00a0it was Dan Marino?) endorsing car dealerships.<\/p>\n
Maybe someone can connect the dots for me: in what way, shape or form does a local\u00a0athlete\u00a0instill\u00a0trust\u00a0or communicate quality to a brand in an entirely different\u00a0vertical? This is a tactic that is a\u00a0serious relic\u00a0of a previous decade. It just\u00a0feels\u00a0<\/em>pass\u00e9. And to savvy consumers, it actually makes a company appear cheesy, unable to provide any\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0qualifying factors other than paying a shill\u00a0and perhaps even desperate.<\/p>\n The reality is every consumer is now informed: \u00a0nearly all\u00a0(97%) of consumers use online media to shop locally and\u00a0a majority\u00a0(86%) consider search engines specifically to be very important to the buying process. Not only does this point to the fact that consumers aren\u2019t really considering pushed messages like TV advertising in their buying process, but stop and think about the user behavior here for a moment.<\/p>\n People are getting savvier about buying decisions for many reasons: the economy is one (high risk to make a bad choice) but the fact that a generation has now grown up with technology is another. The purchasing patterns of the new generation are smarter and tap collective intelligence, modern tools and logic to bypass the old guard telling them what they should buy. The future is clearly show me, not tell me. Celebrity endorsement without rationale is a quaint notion.<\/p>\n So what of the brand ambassador tactic? I don\u2019t think it\u2019s dead, I think it\u2019s changing. For a perfect example: look no further than the example of Robert Scoble\u00a0as an ambassador\u00a0to Rackspace. The partnership actually makes sense, and there is some skin in the game here for both. Scoble isn\u2019t just saying to buy Rackspace in a TV advertisement, he is literally brought in as a team member to produce media and bridge connections for the brand. He is helping them build real (and\u00a0measurable!) equity.<\/p>\n Because of this, Scoble also seriously has to believe in the product, because to some extent their reputations are tied to each other. I guess the main and most simple reason though is that Scoble\u2019s influence extends\u00a0directly to the right market.<\/p>\n It also\u00a0feels\u00a0<\/em>less like he\u2019s a shill and more like a partner. And that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n I think consumers are smarter than most companies treat them. They know to do their research and homework. They understand solutions for their problems exist online and don\u2019t really need to be interrupted by a shill to tell them that yes, in fact they can buy porcelain tile locally. There are better paths to brand awareness than spamming your market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While recently enjoying breakfast at the\u00a0Brickhouse Cafe\u00a0in SoMa (definitely check it out if you live in San Francisco) I couldn\u2019t … <\/p>\n