Prepare Your Staff to Endorse Products

Marketing Daily is reporting that consumers are trusting celebrity endorsements significantly less than they are what family and friends recommend. However, that’s not to say family and friends always come out on top. Other surveys have shown that with financial products, for example, family and friends take second place to expert and professional word-of-mouth. This is why many consumers use financial advisors.
     It’s also behind why many gamers shop at GameStop. The expert staff. Video game retailer GameStop cultivates their employees to make endorsements. This works so well because GameStop employees are selected and coached to be gaming enthusiasts. Among other things, GameStop has rental programs to allow their staff to master the games. Serious gamers come to store employees to learn the tips, traps, and tricks. When a GameStop staff member praises a game, the endorsement is coming with expertise worthy of celebrity.
     Prepare your staff to endorse products.

• What opportunities do you provide your sales staff to thoroughly learn about each of the products and services they're selling? 
• Aside from sales personnel, what are the roles played by others in your store operations, and what interesting tales might they have to share with shoppers? 
• To what degree do you take the recommendations of your staff—those who purchase the merchandise, those who sell to individual consumers, those responsible for business-to-business accounts, those who handle returns, and the rest—as to what items should be pruned out of your merchandise mix because the staff would feel uncomfortable endorsing them? 
• How do you transform your expert staff members into celebrities, such as by featuring their photos in ads, introducing them in social media materials, or even announcing their birthdays over the store speaker system? 
• How well do you train your sales staff to redirect shoppers away from choices which appear not to be in the shopper’s best interests and toward better choices, but without the advice seeming manipulative? 

     The Marketing Daily reporting about the shortfalls of celebrity endorsements came from a Boston Consulting Group white paper titled “The Trust Advantage: How to Win with Big Data.” The paper describes how trust is earned and then points out how the advantages of shopper trust extend beyond just making the immediate sale. People who trust the retailer are willing to give out greater amounts of information helpful in future sales. BCG says that the “trust advantage” can be at least 500%.

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Trumpet Endorsements from Your Store Staff