Beyond Performance: The Reseller Salesperson as Brand Evangelist

Abstract

Manufacturers and wholesalers distributing their products through retail channels depend heavily on retail salespeople to effectively interact with consumers on the supplier’s behalf. Retail salespeople frequently play an important role in the consumer’s purchase decision. Given retailers’ often wide brand assortment, capturing the attention and efforts of the retail salesperson can be challenging. However, since the retail salesperson serves as the manufacturer’s de facto contact point with the consumer, finding ways to increase the share of mind and effort among retail salespeople can be critical to the success of the brand. While salesperson performance in terms of sales is a natural concern for manufacturers and wholesalers, we suggest that there are also broader behaviors with which manufacturers and wholesalers should be concerned that contribute to the performance of the brand. Specifically, we study what leads salespeople to not only expend effort selling the brand, but also to contribute to the broader functioning of the brand in the marketplace. This supportive behavior, referred to as brand evangelism, is the salesperson’s propensity to actively recommend the brand to other people (even those who could not buy from him or her), to encourage retailer management and other employees to focus on the brand, and to verbally promote the brand with people he or she encounters. In this study, using an international sample of retail salespeople, the authors empirically demonstrate that manufacturers and wholesalers can create brand evangelists among retail salespeople by building strong attitudes toward the brand, the supplier representative, and consumer/trade promotions as partially mediated by brand identification. Salespeople who are brand evangelists not only expend in-role effort selling a brand, but also engage in extra-role promotion of a brand to management, coworkers, and the public.