The Ripple Effect

In addition to product, price, place, and promotion, W. P. Carey School of Business marketing professors — a married research team who both earned their PhD in marketing from W. P. Carey — Maura Scott and Martin Mende might add one more “P” to the marketing mix: prosocial ambassadorship.

“We look at marketing research not only as research that can benefit companies, but also research that can benefit consumers, communities, and, frankly, the world,” says Mende. He and Scott believe that it starts on the individual level, where they are hoping to help consumers adopt more environmentally friendly behaviors by encouraging others to become prosocial ambassadors.

As opposed to a typical brand ambassador, prosocial ambassadors are motivated by promoting the greater good rather than by financial or personal gain. It’s a concept used by for-profit brands like MTV and consumer advocacy groups to encourage voting, empower youth, and promote other prosocial behaviors.

Scott and Mende, together with their co-authors Corinne M.K. Hassler of the University of Kentucky and Lisa Bolton of Pennsylvania State University, wanted to investigate whether inviting consumers to engage in prosocial behavior, such as using a reusable shopping bag or water bottle, and asking someone else to do the same is more powerful than either of those two things alone.

They put that theory to the test with four real-world engagement experiments. Their research paper, published in the Journal of Marketing, found that the ambassador role activates a collective identity, which does indeed drive more prosocial behavior.

Why does it work? “We all have an ‘I’ component and a ‘we’ component in our psychological identity,” Mende says. “When you form a group, even with just two people, you can feel like ‘We are in this together.’ ”

And it’s a feeling with a lasting effect. Scott explains that one of their studies followed two groups of consumers for five weeks. The control group received a reusable bag and was encouraged to use it when grocery shopping. The ambassadors received two bags: one for use and another to give to someone else, encouraging that person to use it. “We found week after week that the ambassadors were more often using those reusable bags when grocery shopping,” she says. “This was very encouraging because we saw these people, even with everything else going on, adopting this prosocial behavior into their daily lives.”

Scott says one of the more interesting findings in their research was that asking people who were relatively less concerned about the environment to be an ambassador resulted in substantially greater sustainability behaviors. “This is very promising, because it means that perhaps we can nudge people who are more skeptical,” she says.

Beyond saving the planet, Mende says, another benefit of prosocial ambassadorship is that it saves costs compared to some other marketing efforts. “It’s essentially very cheap, because it’s just a company asking customers to do something or possibly sending a message via text,” he explains.

Brands that engage with prosocial ambassadors on social media can expect to see benefits, too. “Some of our preliminary work shows that when a company recognizes ambassadors’ positive behaviors on social media, that not only bolsters the ambassador’s engagement in that prosocial behavior, it also creates a more favorable impression of the brand in the eyes of that ambassador,” Scott explains.

But it’s a tool and technique that businesses should use wisely. Scott stresses that companies need to work in good faith and be transparent about the goals they’re trying to accomplish when promoting prosocial behaviors. “If people realize they’re being exploited or manipulated, this can backfire on the brand.”

Mende says they plan to push this concept of how prosocial ambassadorship can benefit brands more in future research. “We live in an age of transparency, and consumers hold companies accountable,” he says. “If you use the ambassador effect in a genuine, sincere manner, we find initial empirical evidence that this is good for the brand because it builds brand equity, which is great from a marketing and a financial perspective.”