Thought piece: Why have Influencers had such an impact on brand’s marketing mix?

Influencer marketing is a multi-million-dollar industry that has made a significant impact on how brands engage with their customers and access wider audiences. I’m going to discuss how influencers can bring additional benefits to brand’s marketing strategies and the opportunities for market research, market segmentation and at what stage influencers are used in the customer adoption process, based on my experience working with Superdrug.

Superdrug frequently used influencers to gain access to wider audiences and build consumer trust. Onalytica, an influencer marketing platform I recently partnered with, emphasised why brands can benefit from these partnerships; ‘Influencers can be integrated into so many areas of marketing and comms activity. Everything from content marketing, events strategy, thought leadership, product innovation and PR can be built around an influencer.’ (Morel-Paulo, 2019)

Individuals creating their own audiences wasn’t the original objective of social media platforms, but users started developing their own unique behaviour patterns and changing the way the platforms were used (Koebler, 2015). These self-made behaviours saw the emergence of influencers; normal people with the same access to the platform as everyone else creating accessible and highly engaging content.

And this is the key differentiation between Influencer and Brand led social media activity. Whilst digital marketing ad spend has continued to increase, with global spending nearing $100 billion in 2018 (Busvine, 2018) few brands have managed to generate the same levels of organic engagement generated by successful influencers.

A notable example is Zoella (Zoe Sugg), who shot to fame by reviewing fashion and beauty products in her bedroom at home. She currently has c.23 million followers across her YouTube and Instagram channels and is believed to make £10,000+ for each promoted endorsement. In 2015 she launched her cosmetics line with Superdrug. It was the Retailer’s highest grossing brand launch and highlighted the powerful impact of products endorsed by an influencer on consumer engagement, with a Superdrug spokesperson stating; 'Zoe has built up an enormous fan base who trust her implicitly, they know that she wouldn’t design a product she wouldn’t want to use herself.' (London, 2015)

Zoella’s product launch emphasises how the combination of customer insight, a highly engaged audience and ready distribution network to a large commercial market can successfully launch new products and build market share, even for established brands like Superdrug. But it’s also the element of ‘trust’ mentioned in the quote above that is a key element to the power of influencer marketing. Consumers feel less like a product is being sold to them by a brand and more that its being recommended to them by a trusted source.

And it’s not only what an influencer is promoting, but how they are promoting it that provides a wealth of insight. Superdrug, and their leading suppliers, utilise influencer engagement as a market research tool to gather intelligence around opportunities for innovation, identifying emerging markets and analysing responsiveness and customer sentiment towards a product. This insight also influenced how we marketed the products, mimicking popular influencer format styles to appeal to specific audiences. This ethnographic approach to market research ‘enlightens us about the context in which customers would use a new product and the meaning that product might hold in their lives’ (Anderson, 2009), and ensures a customer centric outlook and awareness for how a consumer uses a product at all levels of development.

It also influenced when in the customer adoption process we would use influencers. Superdrug described themselves as the first to copy rather than be the ones to innovate and therefore the influencers used tended to be ‘Early Adopters’, as described by Everett Rogers in Diffusions of Innovations (1962).  Using influencers like @SophieHannahRichardson and @Salihsworld who had individual and creative looks but widely appealed to an ‘Early Majority’ audience created high engagement and sales. The UCG created by the ‘Early Majority’ consumers would then go on to influence the ‘Late Majority’ consumers, especially around seasonal trends like ‘summer festivals’.

With the Early and Late Majority counting for 64% of consumers, their activity provides huge amounts of data on trends ‘and brands that can utilise this robust and rich data source to deliver real-time consumer insight will be best placed for future success’ (Amos, 2018). Appealing to influencers audiences not only creates high engagement but can feed directly into a brand’s market segmentation and highlight opportunities for strategy differentiation, new product development and developing a better understanding of customers.

In April 2019, high street cosmetics retailer Lush took this a step further when they announced they were closing their UK Social Media accounts, citing it was ‘getting harder to talk to customers’. In an interview with The Drum, a senior Lush spokesperson revealed ‘You’ll start to see the rise of Lush personalities online’. This move created surprise from the public and backlash from marketeers for turning its back on customer communication, but by creating their own personalities Lush will evolve their market segmentation, and as Oliver Yonchev, Managing Director at Social Chain US alluded, ‘how other people are talking about your brand matters far more than how a brand talks about themselves’ (McCarthy, 2019).

By refocusing their activity on social media through influencers, Lush is proactively putting the customer in the centre of their marketing strategy. Having niche audiences will enable them to reflect multiple consumer segments and they’re not alone in taking this approach. ASOS, whilst not moving away from their own social media channels, has a growing team of ASOS Insiders (asos.com, 2019) specifically curated to generate high niche engagement and drive purchase direct from Instagram.

Influencers have opened a direct link between brands and their desired audience, creating authentic, engaging content that can help build an even stronger relationship between consumer and brand. This new medium has helped convert word of mouth into quantitative data and influence product development, distribution and brand positioning across existing and emerging markets. By including influencers and the wealth of information generated from engagement and activity on social media, brands can prevent falling into ‘marketing myopia’ (Levitt, 2014), instead creating customer centric products that drive loyalty, trust and retention.

References

Anderson, K. (March, 2009) Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy. Harvard Business Review. Available from: https://hbr.org/2009/03/ethnographic-research-a-key-to-strategy [Accessed 2nd July 2019]

Amos, H. (14th June 2018) How ‘social prediction’ is transforming the world of consumer foresight. Marketing Week. Available from: https://www.marketingweek.com/black-swan-data-social-prediction/ [Accessed 2nd June 2019]

Busvine, D. (24th September 2018) Global spending on digital marketing nears $100 billion: study. Reuters. Available from: https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-advertising-digital/global-spending-on-digital-marketing-nears-100-billion-study-idUKKCN1M30XN [Accessed 2nd June 2019]

Koebler, J. (23rd April 2015) 10 Years Ago Today, YouTube Launched as a Dating Website. Vice. Available from: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/78xqjx/10-years-ago-today-youtube-launched-as-a-dating-website [Accessed 14th June 2019]

Levitt, T. (July, 2004) Marketing Myopia. Harvard Business Review. Available from:    https://hbr.org/2004/07/marketing-myopia [Accessed 2nd June 2019]

London, B. (7th July 2015) The future smells sweet for Zoella: YouTube sensation, 25, breaks sales records with new beauty range (and tops up her burgeoning bank balance). The Daily Mail. Available from: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3151855/Zoella-breaks-sales-records-new-beauty-range-Superdrug.html [Accessed 2nd July 2019]

McCarthy, J. (9th April 2019) Lush abandons social media: it's 'getting harder' to talk to customers. The Drum. Available from: https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/04/09/lush-abandons-social-media-its-getting-harder-talk-customers [Accessed 18th May 2019]

Morel-Paulo, J. (June, 2019) Onalytica. Available from: https://onalytica.com/ [Accessed 2nd July 2019]

Bibliography

Asos Insiders (2019) ASOS. Available from: https://www.asos.com/discover/insiders/ [Accessed 7th July 2019]

Baxter-Wright, D (13th September 2017) Zoella's career timeline: How the YouTuber became a household name. Cosmopolitan. Available from: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/entertainment/a12227772/zoellas-career-timeline/ [Accessed 3rd June]

Harris, J. (12th September 2018) Influencer Marketing Fraud: The Shady Side of Social Media. Content Marketing Institute. Available from: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/09/influencer-marketing-fraud/ [Accessed 2nd June 2019]

Schmidt, M. (13th February 2019) Calculating The True Size Of The Influencer Marketing Industry. Forbes. Available from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/02/13/calculating-the-true-size-of-the-influencer-marketing-industry/#6e249c1e658d [Accessed 18th May 2019]