Robots as Brand Ambassadors to Empower your Team: Why Augment your Staff With a Robot as a Brand Ambassador?
What is a brand ambassador?
A brand ambassador is someone who is employed by an organization to represent the organization in a positive light. This resultantly leads to increased brand awareness & sales. The brand ambassador, widely known as a goodwill advocate, is meant to embody the corporate identity in appearance, demeanor, values, and ethics.
What would a robotic experience as a brand ambassador mean for consumers? Let’s explore several deployments in the USA, the Netherland, France, and Japan.
How can brand ambassadors grow your business?
The market today is exposed to a plethora of marketing messages. Eventually, the audience is learning to cut through the saturation and ignore what they deem irrelevant - including your highly expensive ads. Brand ambassadors give new customers a reason to trust you. Not only will they attract new customers owing to their authenticity, expertise, and powerful brand voice but also will uniquely create a long-lasting experience for your existing customers thus proving to be highly beneficial for your business. Brand ambassadors build long-term advocacy through their continued commitment to your brand. Unlike any other mode of paid advertising, brand ambassadors will promote your brand throughout, sending out consistent messages that are highly impactful in increasing your brand’s image and definitely more cost-effective!
According to a B2B Buyer’s Survey, industry experts and peers are the top two resources for consumer advice. And from their followers’ points of view, ambassadors often serve as both experts and peers. Imagine having someone who not only vouches for your brand but also never gives out wrong information! Well luckily, SoftBank Robotics Europe has a solution for the description above - our humanoid robot, Pepper.
Technology to the rescue!
No matter who you recruit as a brand ambassador, it’s important to equip them with plenty of product information and assets. This enables them to serve as the best brand ambassador possible, allowing them to promote and answer any questions others may have. Imagine having a social robot as your brand ambassador? It is common to have celebrities, stars, or industry specialists as your brand ambassadors, having a robot promoting your brand is extremely rare!
You can never go wrong with information that is consistent, accurate, and of all, reliable. Pepper can source information on its own by connecting with an application programming interface. It can be embodied with several applications owing to its cloud-based artificial intelligence, be it personalizing experiences, conducting interactive demonstrations, or connecting with an organization’s CRM or sales tools.
Pepper as a Brand Ambassador
Beyond branding, Pepper can sell products, and transactions can be processed through the tab on Pepper. While it does it all, it manages to collect data that can be used to generate insights that otherwise were unavailable. A robot-of-all-work, Pepper has suitably been deployed at the Retail, Finance, Government, and Tourism sectors to amplify the brand’s existence in an innovative way. Following is the case-wise analysis of how Pepper has been of significant advantage as a Brand Ambassador.
1. HSBC
In mid-2018, HSBC bank USA deployed Pepper as their brand ambassador. Being the first bank in the US to bring SoftBank Robotics’ humanoid robot in retail banking, HSBC attracted a large number of customers & press. “By the way, there hasn’t even been this much press for HSBC maybe ever!” -Pablo Sanchez Regional Health of Banking & Wealth Management HSBC USA & Canada
As a brand ambassador, Pepper largely helped HSBC to achieve mainly 3 key performance indicators. It helped increase the total footfall in the flagship branch of HSBC at Fifth Avenue, New York. Now, if you know about New York, you will know that Fifth Avenue is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world where 1.85 million people commute within a half a mile radius of Fifth Avenue. There was a need to attract those people towards the flagship store, and what is better than a humanoid robot answering questions for both customers and noncustomers.
Additionally, HSBC was looking to reduce waiting time & improve waiting experience, especially improve the self-service options. Along with educating both customers and noncustomers about the product & services at HSBC, Pepper saved a good amount of time for the bankers to build relationships with customers by handling repetitive tasks himself.
On the one hand, where people were scared of Robots taking over more jobs, Pepper helped create employment opportunities. You may ask how? When footfall increases, engagement, and interaction triple fold, you cannot do it with fewer people handling customer service but actually more people doing that for you. “My team has grown, our frontline branch staff has grown at the particular branches and other aspects of the organization are growing because of the Pepper effect, which is real!” added Jeremy K. Balkin, Head of Innovation at HSBC Bank.
2. Philips
Philips, the Dutch multinational, sought to digitally transform their innovation branch in Best, Netherlands. As a desire to make it the ‘best’ branch literally, Pepper was deployed as a brand ambassador in mid-2020, and mainly catered to improving the overall brand image and increasing the visitor experience at the reception. A humanoid robot at a healthcare technology company does much more than ‘promoting’ the brand! Pepper was involved in guiding its employees and customers by showing the floor map on its tablet. Pepper truly believes that playing is a powerful tool to learning, and educates its employees and customers about social distancing by a way of playing a small awareness game called ‘1.5meters game’
As a brand ambassador, Pepper is also involved in maintaining business contacts through its accurate and consistent conversations with all guests. Colloquially known as “Philly”, Pepper has been a successful addition to the Phillips team. Not only is it captivating for the customers, but also has excited employees about the new staffing addition at Philips. Truly unconventional, Pepper, or as Philip says, ‘Philly’ is much more than just a brand ambassador!
3. Sonae Sierra
At the Colombo Shopping Centre, visitors are now counting on Pepper to welcome visitors and help locate the stores and at the same time promote the ongoing offer for tenants and other services at the mall to cope up with the downfall due to the pandemic.
As a brand ambassador, Pepper reinforces the safety regulations through its consistent education of social distancing, mask-wearing, and washing hands to all its visitors. Cristina Santos, the administrator responsible for the management of shopping centers at Sonae Sierra, highlights:
“ Pepper will allow visitors to our shopping centers to enhance their visiting experience and make it memorable. At the same time, this initiative promotes the offer of tenants and services, thus seeking more support for the stores and services of the Center. This project is yet another example of the primacy that Sonae Sierra gives to innovation, and demonstrates that the Company has been creating a true omnichannel space to strengthen the balance between digital and physical experience, and, through a culture of flexibility and innovation, focusing on results, anticipating trends and developing modern shopping and leisure spaces ”.
Sonae Sierra is looking forward to deploying Pepper at its other locations in the future to further amplify digitalization that reinvents malls & businesses!
4. Nestlé
Humanity runs on coffee and Pepper is here to support that! In Japan, Nestlé hired 20 Pepper in order to promote its “Dolce Gusto” and “Nescafe Gold Blend Barista” coffee machines and beverages. “Pepper will be able to explain Nescafé products and services and engage in conversation with consumers. I hope that this new consumer engagement model will expand across the world as an example of Japanese innovation” said Kohzoh Takaoka, President, and CEO of Nestlé Japan. A humanoid robot selling Nescafé machines in a home appliance store is quite a sight and memorable encounter! You can chat over coffee to know more about Nestle & the types of coffee with Pepper at the Nestle stores in Japan!
5. Renault
As a brand ambassador for Renault, Pepper has been deployed in Renault dealerships across the country. With over 100 Pepper, Renault is enabling the promotion of its “Megane” vehicle. “With Pepper, we’re offering customers a unique dealership experience,” Valérie Candeiller, Renault France advertising director, commented. “This friendly little robot is a great ambassador of successful French Tech, and it fits in very neatly with the Renault French Touch approach that shines through in our totally up-to-date range of vehicles.” Pepper indeed built an impressive success story that allowed Renault to boost its attractiveness to younger drivers
Final Thoughts
Having a humanoid robot as a brand ambassador is a unique, digitally optimal, and modern solution that can be adequately modified as per the needs of each business. As someone representing your brand, Pepper is a powerful tool that proves to be a one-stop solution for not only promoting your products & services but also for collecting data for your business that is influentially impactful in making any future decisions for your business. Visualize a staffing evolution in your business by deploying a humanoid robot at your business as the face of your business! It is rare, and that is what makes it exceptionally distinctive. Adding the power of artificial intelligence, will not only bring digital evolution to your business but will also lead to a staffing evolution in your industry! Contact us to know more about our humanoid robots.
