Influencer Marketing: Three Lessons From The Best
Chiara Ferragni’s Blonde Salad has been leading the pack for almost a decade
If the name of Chiara Ferragni sounds new to you, you should worry. Especially when you work in cultural industries that target young people. One of the many portraits of this Italian influencer with 17 million followers on Instagram describes her as follows:
“Ferragni was a fashionable Italian law student with a passion for posting photos of her personal style. Now, she sits atop two companies worth $8 million”.
The first of these companies deals with advertising, style and marketing consultancy; its name is TBS, the acronym of The Blonde Salad, as she decided to label her blog which she launched ten years ago. The second, Serendipity, manages the brand “Chiara Ferragni”. Meanwhile, Ferragni has become an entrepreneur with her own fashion collection and single-brand boutiques in Milan, Shanghai and Paris.
Here is the difference between Ferragni and most part of her fellow influencers: as one of the very, very few she successfully has turned her blog into a full-blown lifestyle magazine, by doing so transforming her name into a ravishing brand. Now Ferragni is not only a digital ambassador courted by commercial brands — there are more of them. She is also a distributor of fashion articles through her e-commerce website that is harmoniously integrated into her blogs.
That’s why she can teach at least 3 lessons to anyone who is curious about the use of digital channels in the near future.
Lesson 1: Fashion superficial? Wrong! Fashion leads the way
As to the world of influencer marketing: fashion bloggers (later turned into influencers) were there first & foremost. It is from fashion planet that other branches of the cultural industry learnt the meaning and the value of online communication performed by next-door girls (and boys, women, men, mommies etc.). Influencer marketing techniques are now equally employed in the beauty industry, in the travel industry, in the food industry, in the fitness industry as in fashion industry. But fashion started it and it is justified to mention these influencer marketing technique: à la Ferragni. Waves of new fashion bloggers are transforming themselves into lifestyle storytellers, crossing over to related but different sectors. Once again: à la Ferragni. When you want to understand how the influencer marketing industry is evolving, you can’t miss out on what Ferragni and her emulators do. And once again, it started in fashion.
When fashion is not your industry or area of expertise, you might be tempted to treat it as superficial. Well, think again. Nowhere the triumph of the ephemeral and superficial is more solidly and convincingly intertwined with economic and social weight than in fashion. The evanescence of catwalks and the debates on next season colors are just the surface of immensely powerful underlying economic torrents. As they are just the surface of equally immensely powerful social torrents, in the first place of leading mechanism for social inclusion and exclusion. This is how German philosopher Georg Simmel describes fashion.
And now after a leading economic factor in contemporary culture, and after showing what social inclusion and exclusion looks like, fashion also has opened the gateways to what both serious and lucrative online marketing means in the 21st century.
Lesson 2: Innovate — not on in the least when you are on top already
When The Blonde Salad already totaled more unique visitors than many established fashion magazines, Ferragni was not satisfied with the result. Success for her was just one more reason to push harder. We are talking about the year 2013, when Chiara was already able to attract 2 million followers on Instagram. This platform started its rise to the top as the most promising and promising social network website. Ferragni grabbed the opportunity and jumped on the new exciting bandwagon. With her usual determination and easy going elegance she jumped on the bandwagon. Today the Instagram channel generates most of the attention Ferragni generates while at the same time it directs the public towards the products sold by herself and by the brands she advertises.
Over the last two years, authoritative observers have been questioning the power of Instagram and anticipating its coming downfall, due to the overcrowding of commercial contents. Ferragni is certainly studying the next move, the next digital territory to lead her immense powers toward.
Question to our readers; what would you advise Chiara Ferragni as her next move? Please, when you wish: use the comment function below this blog.
Lesson 3: Definitions of authenticity are changing — Ferragni goes with the flow
Certainly on influencer marketing planet authenticity is a peculiar, even twisted word. On the one hand, all influencers claim to be ‘authentic’ while at the same time being heavy promoters of products under hashtags like: #adv and like: #sponsored. And in many parts of the world ‘authentic’ influencers prefer not to mention their revenue streams from advertising and promotion. In that sense authenticity can appear as highly commercial, as commodified, as unnatural, as paradoxical. Is authenticity turned inside out? And how does leading Ferragni approach the theme?
The biographical docu-film Chiara Ferragni-Unposted — presented at the Venice Film Festival in 2019 — shows a complete overlap between Chiara as a person and Chiara as a digitally exposed person. I. In an Instagram story commenting the film, Ferragni says that what we usually see on her Instagram profile is “30% only of her life”. Only!!! That’s her way to authenticity: being who you say you are. Chiara is always online. Her social networking channels are nothing more than a 365/7/24 chronicle of what she does. Simple as that. As fake and fabricated as she may seem, she is what we see on social networks because digital media show an impressive amount of her daytime. Almost no backstage: her followers know (and love) this Big Brother-like show that merges private life and commercial messages in a (coherent?) whole.
No doubt that this is not authenticity as the vocabulary defines it: being true, genuine and organic. However, this is authentic to her fans. A question to you: what is authentic for your hungry-for-authenticity audiences? Give it to them and you will be the Ferragni of your industry. Do not take it as an invitation to circulate more fetishes. On the contrary: come back to the real, as the exaggeration of wannabe-genuine contents is destroying Instagram as we know it.
This is a story of the Futurist Club
by Science of the Time
Written by: Marco Pedroni
Marco Pedroni is a Sociologist of culture based in Milan. He writes about cultural economies, fashion, media, influencer marketing, gambling.
He is the editor of Homo Academicus, a blog on Medium.
He currently serves as an Associate Professor at the eCampus University (Italy). He has taught as an Adjunct Professor at the Università Cattolica of Milan, the University of Bergamo and the Politecnico of Milan, and as a Guest Lecturer for several courses and institutions, including the Milano Fashion Institute and the Marangoni Institute (Italy), the London College of Fashion, the Winchester School of Art, the Northumbria University and the Southampton Solent University (UK), the Aalto University (Finland), the Universidad of Sevilla (Spain), and the Izmir University of Economics (Turkey).
He is the author of Coolhunting (2010), the editor of From Production to Consumption: The Cultural Industry of Fashion (Interdisciplinary, 2013), a co-author of Fenomenologia dei social network (Phenomenology of social network websites, 2017), and a co-editor of Moda e arte (Fashion and Art, 2012). The full list of his scientific articles is available on Academia.edu
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