Getting endorsements

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Question - getting endorsements is really hard work. Are they worth getting?

Answer - definitely. People are very nervous dealing with an organisation which isn’t obviously reputable. Some endorsements are indeed hard and costly to obtain. Some are much cheaper and easier to obtain than you might think

Key action points

As human beings our mental baggage often goes back tens of thousands of years and more.

At one time warning signs and symbols in our environment were a life and death issue. One mistake and you were done for. As primitive man you would have your eyes swivelling in all directions and use whatever knowledge you had acquired but you would also rely on the accumulated wisdom of the tribe, and especially of the tribal elders, to advise which food was safe to eat, which water was poisoned, what climactic conditions were dangerous, how to make the best weapons and so on.

All this time later, we haven’t changed much despite the fact that in many countries of the world our daily risks are considerably less. We might be inconvenienced, we might be disappointed but we are not going to die if we eat in the wrong restaurant or buy a book we cannot get into.

Endorsements are critical in building and maintaining a brand and the two key things to recognise are that there are many different types of endorsement and that they are both explicit and implicit.

In more detail ….

Here is a list of some of the types of explicit endorsement we can think of:

• Legal requirements – some jobs / activities require accreditation in some countries. They will vary from country to country but they are likely to include certain professions, especially ones which are life-threatening if mistakes are made (surgeons, doctors etc.), chemical and pharmaceutical activities, travel and financial services. Individual products and services may have the same requirements for homologation, e.g. FDA approvals for pharmaceuticals and CE markings for products sold in Europe

• Government certification – falling short of a requirement, governments can often offer a formal stamp of approval for the organisation, including a ‘by appointment to the government / king’ sticker or government training certifications

• Institutional certifications – beyond government endorsements, there are many institutions that offer formal certificates, some of which are internationally recognised, such as ISO accreditations. University laboratory test certifications would also fall into this category

• Corporate certifications – beyond institutions, there are many private companies who offer accreditations, such as Verisign to assure customers that the supplier’s payment system is trustworthy. Some of these corporate certifications appear to be institutional or even governmental but in fact are not. The U.S. Federal Reserve is in fact a private organisation

• Certified agencies – many commercial organisations will run a system of training and certifying intermediaries, as in ‘Authorised Dealer’

• Industry awards – most industries have awards, mostly run by private organisations from the Nobel Prize Committee down to TV talent competitions

• Industry guides – related to industry awards are industry guides, such as the Michelin Guide or the Egon Ronay Gide which rate the quality of restaurants. One chef in France committed suicide when his restaurant lost a Michelin star

• Media endorsements – opinion leaders writing for newspapers and other media will offer an endorsement in their reviews of organisations, products and services. This is certainly true of when opinion leaders recommend an organisation, product or service, but it is also true to some extent when they give a mediocre or even bad review. Being reviewed at all is an endorsement of your status. Some categories of media personalities carry quite extraordinary endorsing power, such as TV chefs

• Consultant endorsements – having your organisation, products and services endorsed by well known and respected consultants will make a big difference. Some of these consultants will be easily recognisable, but some will be local people who are not officially consultants as such at all but whom people around them trust to know what they are doing

• Peer endorsements – in general industry, peer endorsements are rare but not impossible. The shop down the road may recommend you if they cannot fulfil a particular customer need. However in less officially competitive industries, such as the arts, these sorts of endorsements are common. Writers will often endorse each other as will musicians

• Customer endorsements – as social media groups become ever more important, what your customers are saying about you becomes more visible. Word of mouth is a highly influential endorsement even if nobody has the first idea who the endorsing customer is

• Rubbing shoulders with the government – the heads of certain organisations are well known to be consulted by governments and are even appointed to participate in or head up government quangos. This does not say anything about the quality of the organisation as such but it does say that its leaders are respected in high places

• Membership of committees and institutions – representatives from industry leading organisations are often invited to be officials within institutions, either to help run those institutions or to help set standards, such as national standards

• Membership of trade associations – being a member of a trade association does not say a thing about the quality of your organisation directly; most organisations can become members of trade associations, they only have to pay. Nonetheless, membership of a trade association does suggest that you are a reputable organisation

• ‘A’ list connections – in many industries, there is an unofficial ‘A’ list of people, organisations or brands that are expected to hang around together. The company you keep says a lot about you

• Running industry awards / sponsorships – general sponsorship or sponsorship of industry awards places you within the higher echelons of your industry’s hierarchy, even if the awards you dole out, or the activities you sponsor, bear no relationship to the industry your are in – for instance the Man Booker Literary Award

• Celebrity endorsements – the fact that a celebrity allows themselves to be associated with your products and services is a major indirect endorsement. It says nothing as such about the quality you offer, only that you are paying that celebrity a stack of money. Still, if you can afford to pay that stack of money and the celebrity feels that it is safe to take it ….

• Product placement – related to celebrity endorsement is celebrity product placement. The fact that a celebrity is seen to be using your product or service does not, of itself, mean that it is any good, but potential customers will often see it that way. We have lost track of how many heroes in movies are seen working at Apple computers – rather more than have ever been manufactured we would guess

• Being discussed in the media – even if no-one is even recommending or endorsing you, simply being mentioned as part of the currency of events is an implied endorsement. This is where even appalling organisations sometimes gain a certain status, as in ‘being famous for being famous’

• Having your CEO as a media personality - another way to use the media is to have a high-profile employee, such as the CEO, appear as a regular commentator or opinion leader

• Being sold in prestige outlets – the fact that your products and services are sold by reputable outlets endorses you, which is why totally unknown brands can shift a lot of units in a major supermarket chain. Customers may not trust you at all, but they do trust the people who are selling you

• Being the market leader – the market leadership claim uses the ‘million flies cannot be wrong’ principle. Most people know that virtually any organisation can validly claim to be a market leader – it depends how you define the market – but the claim often sticks anyway. Market leadership also suggests that you will be around tomorrow when you are urgently needed to fix a problem or to complain to

• Attending exhibitions – it is very hard to put together a cost-benefit analysis to support your attending a major national exhibition, but it is the sort of thing reputable organisations do. Potential customers will be looking at the size of your stand to assess just how reputable you are even if they never visit it

• Advertising – again, advertising is not a direct endorsement of your products and services. Anybody can do it. However, prestigious advertising or relentless advertising puts potential customers on notice that you are a major player

• Appearance – your organisation will ‘appear’ in the market in many ways from the sumptuousness and location of your offices, the way your employees dress (e.g. in suits or white coats depending upon the function), the quality of your brochures down to the cars your employees drive. It all says more about you than you ever can

• Image as a responsible, caring organisation – many international companies are going flat-out to consolidate their images as responsible, caring organisations from developing environmentally friendly policies to the publication of mission statements. An extreme form of this is the publication of social responsibility reports as part of the organisation’s reports and accounts to suggest that not only are they setting beneficial policies, they are also trying to implement them

• Quality of ingredients - the quality of the ingredients you use will say a lot about the quality of your products and services. This will include ‘co-branding’ programmes such as the ‘Intel Inside’ campaign which might well appear on the computer you are currently using, down to an ‘all natural ingredients’ claim. Even the fact that you are accredited to Visa and Mastercard for payments says that you have passed some basic business integrity checks

• Quality of employees – in theory, you can have very good employees working for a very bad organisation but the more your employees are certificated up or the more you are certificated up as a model employer, the more the customer is happy. Virgin used to put employee relations as number one in its branding strategy (maybe it still does) arguing that happy, motivated employees saying good things about the company and treating the customers well would say more about Virgin than its marketing communications ever could

• Heritage – in most cases, the fact that your organisation has been in existence for many years, and maybe centuries, is an endorsing factor, even if it is largely tendentious because the longer it has been established on average the more transitions there will have been of management, of ownership, of product and service portfolios, and of working practices. Many beers trumpet their ancestry but are in fact owned by conglomerates such as Inbev

• Product directories – appearing in a standard industry product directory or catalogue may be key to the transaction of doing business but it also says something about the prestige of your organisation

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