Well, this was an interesting debate as usually companies search high and low to try and find the best people that would be ideal ambassadors for their products. People relate to other people better than a corporate employee as the assumption would be that they are just like you. But here came the interesting part. They had a choice between a person who is known for giving honest public feedbacks where as a business they see that as a risk. Who wants influential people to bad mouth your product correct? As well, they had a choice with someone who clearly would do everything to only put the company in a positive light. Therefore, he sounded like a less risky choice as they could control him more. Of course, the tradeoff is he wouldn’t be as trust worthy to people as one would easily view that person as a corporate mouthpiece.
So it was interesting to see the company struggle on who to choose. For fun, people used an AI to ask which one it would choose. Fairly quickly, it stated it would choose the person who is honest and is willing to all out faults because in this day and age people value authenticity. It was describing how by working with someone who is known to be honest it shows people that the company is actively working towards making things better. This would theoretically be better in the long-term as the other route was listed as being better in the short term.
I would agree with the AI as this is a reason why social media became big where the average person can often have more influence on buying habits then a well-known celebrity that is paid to say good things. It’s surprising to me how so many companies still go with the pay for an endorsement route. Example, it’s easier to see if the person actually genuinely uses the product too after the promotion where it hurts the company even more if they see their ambassador use a competitor’s product.
I suppose businesses need to be reminded that consumers are savvier nowadays with how fast one can research information. Authenticity is the way to go.