The Brand Ambassador Bubble in Cameroon

About three weeks ago, my man Tino Foy made this post on Facebook: “Very soon we will hear things like ‘when I grow up, I want t to become a brand ambassador.’” When I read that, I laughed very hard and I wish to say I almost fell off my chair, except I was lying on my bed.

There is, fortunately, and unfortunately, a rising wave in the cognizance of, and in discussions surrounding brand and branding. It is sad that these two words are now used in Cameron more as being buzzwords, than for the knowledge and the understanding that people actually have of them. Oddly enough, it is the people that are in industries where the effect of this is most felt on personal brands that are very often quite aloof on the topic.

That is why you will hear an up-and-coming Molyko rapper tell you that he is working on his brand before he even enters a studio to make a record. It sounds outlandish, but it is also true.

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Today, the problem with branding, and by extension, brand ambassadorship, is that like very many other things, social media has glamourised it. The deep meaning of the concept and the weight it carries along with it has been lost in the cheers in the comment section of blog posts. Bloggers jump on every opportunity to clap for any musician that signs any collaborative deal with any company by calling it a brand endorsement, calling the said musician a brand ambassador, and congratulating them on “securing the bag.”

Nevermind that these very bloggers never reach out to these artists to understand the nature of the collaboration in the instances where the artistes and the business entity fail (and this happens a lot) to communicate the NATURE of the collaboration and to explain that to their audience

Because, if these bloggers or just the sheer people in the comment section actually did their best to do a little research, they will understand that many of the deals that artistes sign with business entities are not necessarily brand endorsements, and these deals do not necessarily put these artists under the category of brand ambassadors. It is worrisome that they are more focused on the euphoria, glad to make it look like our industry is advancing, finally, as is the case with our neighbours to the west.

Let’s just say if you called Mel Dibson a brand ambassador because she appeared on the billboard of Banque Atlantique at the start of the year, you need to take a few online courses in marketing.

But that is a whole different topic.

The blame also can be shifted onto the business entities who have, in a way, watered-down down the concept by going for popularity, rather than for a clear strategy where the correlation between the artist and the brand is clearly seen and where impact with whomever they are working with is a primordial prerequisite. I always go back to the Daphne-Mami Makala flour as a good example of a marketing DON’T-DO.

But that, again, is a whole different topic.

What I want to bring to light today is the fallacy in the picture-perfect moments of the partnership signing between, say a musician and a business entity, and the hyperbolic and flattering captions that accompany these. The necessity of such brand collaborations as an alternate stream of income for artists who have seen their primary source of income (album sales) squashed by technology and changing consumer patterns has become lost in the glamour and the illusions that are brought on by these perfectly-captured pictures.

Unfortunately, these illusions are leaving a lot of young Cameroonians thinking that they just need to wake up one morning and declare themselves a musician, or heaven forbid, a public personality (with nothing to show for it) and that automatically makes them eligible to become a brand ambassador for so-and-so brand.

A lot of them happen to be in the Biggy237 house; at least judging from many conversations I have seen from Twitter, this is what the people following the show expect to happen to the housemates. I just saw someone consoling Melinda Swan (who has been evicted twice from the house), not to worry, because soon enough, brands will contact her and she will ‘blow.’ I balled my twitching fingers into a fist, relaxed them, and kept scrolling.

I’m not saying that the young lady cannot get something in that line someday. I am saying that anyone who is going to be giving her anything just because she was in the Biggy237 house is going to be doing so for the wrong reasons and because they have not thought strategically about correlation and impact.

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Brand ambassadorships, given the direction in which we are headed, will soon become one of those things that people put on their bios to inflate their ego and to make them feel good about themselves. Kind of like those people who visit one orphanage in December and call themselves philanthropists. What am I saying? It is happening already!

And as this cycle continues without either party understanding the tenets, the strong need for correlation, the importance of strategising, the value of the right communication mechanism, and (I stress on this one) the weight of the exchange of value between the two parties, we will continue to produce young people who equate being a brand ambassador with being hip and being in tune with pop culture.

That bubble is growing at a fast rate, and the earlier it is burst, the better it will be for society, and the better it will be for brands like the one with the swoosh, whose brand name alone, is estimated by some experts to be worth more than its physical assets because it put much thought into its brand ambassadorship eligibility.

- Wandji Wilfred.

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