Masterclass - How to Create a 250,000 Member Brand Ambassador Program

"Don't screw up the whisky"

Photo by John Fornander on Unsplash

Happy Monday, y’all! Today we are going to cover the story of how one of the most successful brand ambassador programs ever was created. As with most good stories, there’s some trickery, some shenanigans, and a whole lotta whisky involved.

Maker’s Mark was founded in 1953 by Bill Samuels Sr. Senior had two defining character traits that are relevant to our story: First, he was a classic craftsman. As such, he was devoted to his craft of making amazing bourbon, and really didn’t care for any external processes or responsibilities past that. Second, he absolutely hated marketing and PR. So much so that he felt traditional marketing and PR was rude and embarrassing. His son, Bill Samuels Jr, once remarked “Dad only gave two interviews in his life, and both times I had to trick him”.

The second interview that Samuels Sr. unwittingly gave would totally change the entire trajectory of tiny little Maker’s Mark, and jettison it from being a local Kentucky brand, to a national brand. Overnight. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Bill Samuels Sr and Jr were diametrically opposed when it came to the concept of marketing and promotion. Junior viewed marketing as a necessary business function in order to grow a brand. Senior viewed marketing in the traditional sense as rude and distasteful. And to Senior’s credit, much traditional marketing is exactly that.

Bill Samuels Sr’s view was that your customers are your friends, and since Senior viewed all his customers as his friends, and since he also felt that you don’t aim marketing messages at your friends, then Senior was perfectly happy if Maker’s Mark did no marketing at all.

Which drove Bill Samuels Jr bonkers. He would remark that many of the early marketing meetings he would have with his dad would involve the younger Bill Samuels pitching a marketing idea to his dad. Dad would then excuse himself to go to the restroom…and never come back.

In Junior’s mind, Maker’s Mark needed to do some marketing to build brand awareness, and he knew his dad would never agree to such. So Junior did the only logical thing: He tricked his dad into doing some PR to build the brand.

Bill Samuels Jr came up with a list of four major publications that he wanted to target to give coverage to Maker’s Mark. One of those publications was the Wall Street Journal. In 1980, Samuels Jr learned that the spirits reporter for the WSJ would be Louisville working on another story. At the time, Maker’s Mark’s distillery had just been declared a Historic Landmark, and the younger Samuels decided to launch his plan.

He worked with a local news station to do a story on Maker’s Mark being named a Historic Landmark. He learned that he had a contact who was friends with the visiting WSJ reporter, and working with his contact, they made sure that the WSJ reporter saw the segment the news station ran on Maker’s Mark. Intrigued, the WSJ reporter then reached out to Bill Samuels Jr and asked to come tour the distillery.

Before leaving town, the WSJ reporter toured the Maker’s Mark distillery, and met Bill Samuel's Sr. He left and then wrote a front page article on Maker’s Mark for the WSJ. This marked the first time ever that a private company was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

And then the phones rang.

As soon as the Wall Street Journal published its front page article introducing the rest of the country outside of Kentucky to tiny Maker’s Mark, suddenly everyone wanted to buy from Maker’s Mark. So overnight, Maker’s Mark went from being a brand that was known in Kentucky, to one that was known nationwide.

While interest in Maker’s Mark expanded rapidly overnight, supply could not. Maker’s Mark bourbon took 6 years to age until it was ready to be sold. So obviously, the coverage from the WSJ began to look like it may be too much of a good thing for the brand. Interest had boomed, but product supply and distribution simply could not keep up.

So Bill Samuels Jr, who was now President of Maker’s Mark, had some tough decisions to make.

One of those decisions he made that would have massive ramifications to the future of Maker’s Mark was, he decided he needed to start listening to his dad when it came to marketing Maker’s Mark.

Bill Samuels Sr didn’t want to promote Maker’s Mark to his customers. Instead, he wanted his customers to come to him and express an interest in learning about his bourbon. In Senior’s mind, it was rude to advertise your product to a customer. But if the customer came to Maker’s Mark and expressed an interest in learning more, then it was fine to promote the product to them.

So Samuels Jr, started working within a framework that incorporated his father’s beliefs toward marketing and promotion. Samuels Jr called it ‘marketing without fingerprints’, and he described the general idea as ‘we shall not invade the airspace of our customers, unless we have been invited in’.

One of the key changes Samuels Jr made was to more aggressively work with existing customers and help them market to and acquire new customers. Due to the WSJ article, demand for Maker’s Mark had exploded nationwide. For a time, Maker’s Mark was able to continue to engage with its current customer base and have them reach out to bars and stores around the country to encourage them to carry and order Maker’s Mark.

But as the years passed, Samuels realized that Maker’s Mark was losing its ability to connect directly with its customers. Customer engagement was ingrained in the culture of Maker’s Mark, and it distressed Samuels that Maker’s Mark becoming a national brand had fractured its ability to connect with its customers.

Prior to the WSJ article in 1980, Bill Samuels Jr and Sr had effectively grown the brand organically by directly interacting with their customers in Kentucky. In fact, in the early days of the brand, father and son had a personal connection and relationship with almost every Maker’s Mark customer. It meant that the customer base would grow more slowly, but it also meant that Maker’s Mark had a deeper knowledge and appreciation for its customers. While father and son may have disagreed on the role of marketing, they were on the same page when it came to the value of connecting with and listening to their customers.

But the brand’s ability to engage directly with its customers was severely strained by the growth in interest after the WSJ article. Throughout the 80s and into the 90s, the brand’s ability to directly engage with its customers slipped further and further away from it.

Finally, Bill Samuels Jr went to the Board of Directors and told the group that it had fundamentally lost its ability to directly connect with its customers at scale, and that a change had to be made.

“I just said we gotta do this, this is at the heart of the brand.  We’ve got a real problem in losing control of our ability to talk to friends.”

The solution came in 2000 in the form of the Maker’s Mark Brand Ambassador Program.

The brand ambassador program gave Maker’s Mark a structure to reach more customers directly. Maker’s Mark could select members for the program (ambassadors), then train those ambassadors on how to promote the brand to other customers. This made perfect sense to Maker’s Mark, as the brand had always embraced the idea of allowing customer acquisition to flow through existing customers.

Under the old model, Maker’s Mark would directly engage with customers predominantly in Kentucky, and that was it. So Maker’s Mark had a good deal of control over customer engagement and messaging with customers in Kentucky, and little to no control over messaging with customers outside of Kentucky.

Prior to 1980, that wasn’t a big deal, as 99% of the brand’s customers lived in Kentucky. But by 2000, that customer mix had completely flipped, and the brand would never have any direct engagement with the vast majority of its customers.

The brand ambassador program addressed that problem head on.

One of the most common objections I hear from companies about launching a brand ambassador program is they fret over a supposed loss of messaging control. Such companies believe that creating a formal brand ambassador program shifts messaging control from the brand to the customer, and that scares them.

Maker’s Mark looked at a brand ambassador program as a way to get more control over brand messaging.

First, Maker’s Mark accepted business reality: Their customers are going to talk about the brand whether or not Maker’s Mark engages with them. But left to their own devices, these customers may promote Maker’s Mark in a way that the brand doesn’t want to see.

By launching a formal brand ambassador program, Maker’s Mark had a way to coach and train its members (ambassadors) on how to connect with other customers. Maker’s Mark simply accepted the behavior that its customers were already engaging in (talking to other customers) and worked WITH their customers to help them talk to other customers in a way that the brand supported.

So what does an ambassador get? First, Maker’s Mark is notoriously secretive about its brand ambassador program. Bill Samuels Jr noticed early on that the brand ambassador program was bearing fruit for Maker’s Mark, and was very careful not to broadcast that fact. He remarked on the early success that his thinking was “Oh shit, it’s working…let’s not tell anyone!’

It’s rumored that the current membership of the Maker’s Mark brand ambassador program is around a quarter million. Think about that for a minute: Maker’s Mark has a quarter of a million customers who it works with directly to help it acquire new customers for it. It’s obviously a massive competitive advantage for the brand!

Details on the responsibilities of the ambassadors are also a hard to come by. But we do know a bit more about some of the perks:

• Ambassadors get their name on a barrel of Maker’s Mark bourbon. They are given a barrel number and can tour the distillery and see their barrel as it ages. When it’s ready, the ambassador gets a bottle from their barrel!

• There’s a big focus on giving the ambassadors special access to events, meetups, tours of the distillery, etc. This is very smart, as it helps drive home the fact that Maker’s Mark views its ambassadors as special customers who get perks that reflect that status.

• Free Christmas present and ambassador-only events and meetups. Love the community aspect and having the ambassadors connect with each other. Very smart as this also builds loyalty to the program and reduces churn.

The Maker’s Mark brand ambassador program is about empowering ambassadors to have more ownership and feedback into the brand, as well as giving ambassadors exclusive access and event opportunities. It’s all about positioning the ambassadors as being special customers who deserve special considerations. And that in and of itself becomes a motivating factor in driving program signups.

The creation, design and execution of the Maker’s Mark brand ambassador program all flowed from a simple idea that was ingrained in the brand’s culture: Respect for the customer. Maker’s Mark has always viewed its customers as friends, and by defining the relationship in those terms, that helps frame Maker’s Mark’s behavior toward their customers/friends.

The brand trusts their friends. They listen to them, they empower them to market for them. They actively encourage them to promote the Maker’s Mark brand to other customers, and that leads to the customers developing greater trust, loyalty affinity toward Maker’s Mark.

Key takeaway: By investing in a brand ambassador program, Maker’s Mark acquired a way to connect directly with its customers, at scale. This gave the brand unprecedented control over brand messaging. It also gave the brand the ability to more easily acquire new customers via the efforts of existing brand ambassadors.

Think about your own business: If starting today, 250,000 of your customers started promoting your business and acquiring customers for you, what would be the impact to your business starting tomorrow?

That’s what a well-run brand ambassador program can do for your business.

Source links: Ben and Jackie’s spectacular podcast interview with Bill Samuels Jr. (Scroll down to the Jan 11th, 2006 entries and click on the podcast link under the post on the interview with the CEO of Maker’s Mark.)

Info on what’s included as a Maker’s Mark brand ambassador.

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BIG announcement coming on Thursday, plus another fun story, this one on how the most popular painting of all time received its notoriety. Hint: It has nothing to do with the painting, in fact, it became famous in great part because everyone totally ignored it! More on that on Thursday!

Have a wonderful week, thank you ALL for reading, and sharing Backstage Pass. I greatly appreciate you. Say hi on Substack!

Mack