Media training for brand ambassadors – three top tips
Over the last few years, we’ve seen the explosion of brand ambassadors – and not, surprisingly, more PR companies, marketing departments and communications teams are coming to us to ask about media training for brand ambassadors.
They know that it’s a very effective way to get a big name on board to promote a product, service or company. It’s also great for social and below-the-line advertising. But they also recognise the risks involved in using celebrity endorsements and brand ambassadors.
Media coaching for brand ambassadors
Media coaching for brand ambassadors is an essential way to minimise risks and to ensure that you get the best from your investment. Our experienced journalists, working under strict non-disclosure agreements, can put brand ambassadors and celebrities through role play media interviews. This allows their PR advisors to work closely with them to ensure that they are completely comfortable with the marketing messages. It also enables them to handle any difficult or awkward questions that might come up during a media interview.
Here are a few things that brand managers and public relations consultants should think about when arranging media interviews for brand ambassadors and celebrities.
1. Think about the message that you want to put across.
“Our product or brand is brilliant,” might be your overall message but having a brand ambassador just say this won’t work in a media interview. Even the softest, friendliest journalists will see through it and be unimpressed. Much of the media, now slightly sceptical or even cynical about brand ambassadors and celebrity endorsements, will ridicule such a blatant, hard sell.
In our media coaching for brand ambassadors we help them to work closely with the brand team to develop messages and ideas that work well for the media while promoting the product or service itself. We can then test these ideas before the brand ambassador puts them across in a real media interview.
2. Think about stories
While we don’t like a hard sell in the media, we love stories. It’s important that brand and marketing teams work with brand ambassadors to develop stories. Again, in our media training courses for brand ambassadors we can help them to identify and tell stories, examples and anecdotes which will engage audiences while subtly putting across key marketing messages.
These stories might be about the brand ambassador’s first encounter with the product. It might be something about their likes and dislikes or their daily routine that they can use to show why they’re such fans of the brand that they’re promoting. It might be a funny, quirky little story that they can throw in and that their PR consultants can be confident will be picked up and used by the journalist. As we say in our media training courses, everyone tells stories and so as soon as you’re doing this in a media interview, not only can you feel confident, but you know that you’re making the running and it’s less likely that the journalist will interrupt you.
Media training workshops for brand ambassadors
In our media training workshops for brand ambassadors and celebrities, we help them to identify these stories and advise interviewees on how tell them in a concise and engaging way. We also show how to use them to put across a key message clearly but subtly.
Another advantage in storytelling is that it helps with authenticity. In our media coaching for brand ambassadors, we’ll help them to find the words and phrases that feel right for them when they’re doing interviews to promote a product or service. The marketing team might have their key messages and brand propositions, but if their brand ambassador doesn’t feel comfortable using the marketing language then it will simply negate all their hard work.
Brand ambassadors bring in the human angle – something the media is always interested in. Therefore, brand ambassadors and celebrities need to sound human and authentic, as if they really believe what they’re saying. In our media training courses for brand ambassadors, we can help them to identify the words and phrases that they want to use and then test them out in role-play interviews.
3. Identify difficult questions – and have answers for them.
Because the idea of celebrities endorsing a product or service is so well established these days journalists, always looking for something new, are increasingly likely to want to trip up a brand ambassador. Even if they don’t intend to cause trouble, an apparently innocent and sensible answer can still land in a way that embarrasses the brand.
As part of our Media coaching for brand ambassadors our experienced journalists ask questions that could be difficult or embarrassing – in a safe space, of course. They might also put something to a brand ambassador something which is simply irrelevant to the subject of the interview and to the product or service. The danger is that the brand ambassador tries to answer the question or has a spontaneous thought or observation and before they know it, this has turned into an embarrassing headline.
Media coaching for brand ambassadors
Identifying these potentially difficult or risky questions and role-playing them in a realistic but safe environment allows the brand team and PR consultants to work with us to help the brand ambassador to avoid them and move back onto safe territory. Nobody wants to sound like a dodgy politician or somebody who’s blatantly avoiding a question. However, but there are ways of handling even difficult issues that can sound convincing to the audience as well as reassuring the marketing team that the brand ambassador is still on message.
Unfortunately, even when a brand endorsement seems to have been created in marketing heaven, brand ambassadors are still a human beings and human beings are fallible. We all know of celebrity endorsements that have gone wrong. With our crisis communications for celebrities and brand ambassadors we can advise marketing expert and PR consultants on what to do when a crisis envelops a brand ambassador. We help them to develop strategies and prepare statements that will minimise the impact and protect the brand.
Crisis communications courses
You’ve invested time and money in identifying recruiting and preparing your brand ambassador. You obviously want to make sure that at that crucial moment when they come to speak to journalists everything works well. That’s where our media training for brand ambassadors comes in. Let’s talk! You can follow us on LinkedIn here.
