Brand Ambassadors is not a new concept of marketing, it is perhaps as early, if not earlier than the concept of marketing itself.

The idea of brand ambassadors is relatively simple compared to other, more sophisticated marketing techniques: Take an already famous person with many admirers, pay the person to endorse your products and then hope that they can influence their admirers to purchase your products.

With big name companies using brand ambassadors at an aggressive scale, surely it must be working, right?

Let’s analyze a few cases to have a clearer picture.

Out of all companies, perhaps Nike is the most aggressive in terms of courting its brand ambassadors. LeBron James, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are just a few examples of strong brand ambassadors for Nike. And looking at how Nike is doing currently, and how consumers are relating to the Nike brand, it is hard to argue against the effectiveness of brand ambassadors.

However, if we shift to another industry, things look a little bit different.

In the tech industry, examples of up-and-center brand ambassadors are Alicia Keys for BlackBerry and Jessica Alba for Windows Phone. Both are weak and flailing brands in the mobile operating system market.

Meanwhile, Apple uses famous actors in their commercial, not binding them as brand ambassadors, as seen in these Siri – advertisements. And needless to say, their marketing campaign trounces the competition.

So what do we actually make of brand ambassadors?

Firstly, it highly depends on whether a market leader with strong exposure is using it or a weaker competitor is trying to use it to catch up. It seems that brand ambassadors work best for strong market leaders to further cement their position.

Secondly, it also highly depends on the industry of the business. As the sporting industry has more people trying to become athletes, they are more inclined to buy what the athletes recommend them. The same link cannot be established between an actress and a technology product.