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

"Don't screw up the whisky"

Photo by John Fornander on Unsplash

For over 20 years, I've worked with Fortune 500 companies and startups to help them build better customer engagement, acquisition and retention strategies. Every issue of Backstage Pass pulls back the curtain and shares what I've learned, and teaches you how to apply these same concepts to grow your own Substack into a sustainable business.

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.