Who Are the Real Influencers
Influencer marketing professionals who are paying celebrities or even advocates large sums of money to be “influencers” may be on the wrong track. Nothing I will say here applies to every product or service, but the coming changes in consumer behavior from technologies like the chatbot or the in-home digital assistant make it necessary to re-define who influencers actually are and how to connect with them.
Ken Auletta’s book “Frenemies,” published a couple of weeks ago, has raised questions about the future of advertising, and of brands. Auletta has been the media columnist (Annals of Communication) for the New Yorker since the 90s, and he’s seen all the changes.
However in his book, Auletta assumes brands will always have a need to reach consumers, and that need can’t be satisfied at scale in any way but through advertising. Apparently, he hasn’t even gotten to influencer marketing yet in his thought processes, although I shouldn’t make that assumption until I finish the book.
But there are two flaws I’ve found in the parts I’ve read so far:
First, that advertising, in the old definition of something created by an agency for a product, is the only way to reach consumers. This is gradually being proven false by the rise of Chatbots, admittedly faster on WeChat in China than it is on WhatsApp or Facebook in the US. Chatbots make it possible to reach consumers without every using digital or out of home or TV or any other kind of old school media.
Or indeed, without anyone using an agency, unless agencies transform into script writers for bots. This would take quite a transformation, because they’d need to know A LOT more about the individual customer than they do now, or than current law allows them to know. Remember GDPR? Conversational marketing, in which a brand has a direct conversation with a customer, will change the way customers and introduced to, and interact with products.
The fact that customers run the process of interacting with products on a chat platform (they have to choose to follow, for example, StitchFix or KLM Airlines).
Second, that brands are still important in a world in which everyone simply walks around the house saying “Alexa, send me dishwasher pods.” In that situation, Alexa might choose to send me the same brand I’ve bought before, eliminating any discovery process, or she might send me Amazon Basics, Amazon’s quickly growing “house brand.”
And I’m not talking about just consumer brands, either.
These two examples prove that the only influencer in the future will be the customer, and mobilizing customers to be your influencers is worth expending a great deal of energy on. In business to business marketing we already know this, because we have had to know it, and that’s why we create communities of customers. In business to consumer marketing, we marketers must jump on this bandwagon quickly.
