Brands are increasingly turning to brand ambassadors to market their products. Ambassadors are individuals with credibility in a given area who are hired by a brand to introduce consumers to a given product and educate them about its advantages.

Liquor companies, for example, often hire bartenders as brand ambassadors. The bartenders / brand ambassadors then tell their customers about the company’s brand of gin, and train other bartenders in making signature cocktails with that gin.

Brand ambassadors provide companies and products with valuable credibility. Wouldn’t you trust a liquor recommendation that came from a bartender over one that came from a salesperson?

The downside is logistics. Creating a regional or national team of brand ambassadors requires big investments in recruitment, training and management.

With Drupal however, you can create an online system that helps recruit, manage and monitor brand ambassadors with much less investment.

This project was another collaboration between design and development shop ISL Consulting in San Francisco, and ClearMetrics digital agency in New York.

The Problem

The client, Twinlab, is a major manufacturer of sports nutrition supplements. They wanted to set up a brand ambassador program from scratch, and they had two overriding goals:

1.) Excellent Applicant Screening: The sale and marketing of sports nutrition supplements is extensively regulated at federal and state levels. As a result, Twinlab couldn’t hire just any personal trainer or gym employee to be a brand ambassador. They needed to find and screen candidates with extensive knowledge of supplements and supplement regulations.

2.) Incentives: Twinlab wanted its brand ambassadors to steer people to its online store, Twinlab.com, to buy product. To do that effectively, Twinlab needed to reward the ambassadors each time a consumer they referred to the site made a purchase. In essence, they need to set up an offline affiliate program.

3.) Flexible Support: The brand ambassadors were to be contractors, working independently in their local markets to raise awareness of Twinlab. They wouldn’t have constant, face-to-face contact with Twinlab marketing staff. As a result, the company needed a way to get the ambassadors new product information and sales collateral (like brochures, posters, signage, etc.) quickly.

Costs had to be kept at a minimum in achieving all these goals. Twinlab couldn’t hire a full-time staff to hire and manage its brand ambassadors. All these tasks would have to be centralized and simplified by an online system.

Drupal was chosen because the client was already running Ubercart with the coupon module very successfully. This site was added to a multi-domain installation so that products could be shared from other sites with this site.