A Darker Side of Ecommerce Influencer Marketing

There are many ‘dark’ elements to Influencer Marketing, simply as there are also many positives.

Here’s something few discuss:

Influencer Marketing work’s ‘best’ in specific groups. Particularly, often certain groups of people in their teens and early twenties.

If you turn back in your mind through the case research studies you’ve seen re effective influencer marketing, you’ll probably discover things like:

• Kylie Cosmetics –– targets girls –– $hundreds of countless income.
• GymShark –– generally targets youths.
• Daniel Wellington –– watches mostly worn by people in their teens/the early twenties.
• Glossier –– another beauty brand, also targeting teens/the early twenties.
• HiSmile –– Teeth whitener targeting (basically) teens.
• Triangl –– swimwear brand targeting teenagers.

If you go through style examples, you can most likely think about a couple of luxury brands that press heavily within influencer marketing, however, if you limit to the ones where they have actual huge success in sales it tends to be the streetwear end of the high-end market, or (fairly) lower pricepoint products marketed at late teens/early 20s purchasers.

There are exceptions to this naturally, but in the primary, the locations where you see the greatest success are those who target teens and simply over. To be clear, that’s not specifically a bad thing, after all, there are lots of marketing channels that have higher effectiveness within particular demographics: Radio for car commuters/office employees, Paper pamphlets for >> 55-year-olds, etc. And in fact, a number of the online marketers doing the ‘targeting’ in this case fit directly into the age bracket themselves (HiSmile was founded by a person in his early 20s).

But why does ‘influencer marketing’ work ‘better’ with these specific audiences? I keep in mind talking to the CEO of an influencer-led brand name making $XX-million per month in its busier months, asking him why this was. He had 3 answers:

• People in their teens/the early twenties tend to be more impressionable than (say) people in their late 50s.
• Individuals at that age tend to be a little more spontaneous. (helpful if a marketer is trying to persuade someone to leap straight from a mention of something on Instagram to a purchase; possibly this is because of dedications)
• Individuals at that age have frequently not decided on particular brands/fallen deep into specific grooves of design yet.

The first of those reasons tend to be the location in which influencer marketing pushes across from bringing pleasure to feeling exploitative: Picking a target particularly since they are impressionable, using influencers they follow strongly, and creating a product created to exploit that.

An example of that kind of feel is this:

That’s Kim Kardashian, encouraging her fans to invest $30 on lollipops to reduce their appetites, in order to accomplish a ‘flat tummy’.

On the surface area that feels a bit dodgy –– and it was gotten by a lot of news outlets. However, they all concentrated on an extremely narrow part of the story (Kim K):

Who paid for the advertisement?

You’ll keep in mind in the Insta post the hashtag ‘#ad’ appears. Kim K was paid for that advertisement, however, none of the news sources really asked “who exactly is paying her?”. When considering that, and factor they specifically picked Kim K, it feels a bit more sleazy:

• Kim K is selected firstly since she has a substantial profile, but also because a big percentage of her follower-base fits in the ‘vulnerable to influencer marketing’ teen range (some a little older, however also some even more youthful).
• These are the men who essentially paid Kim Kardashian to do that:

Those are the directors of ‘Synergy CHC’. They purchase up or launch brand names focused on development through influencer marketing. One of their big successes is they acquired a brand name called ‘Flat Tummy Co’ inn 2015, from an Australian couple (Tim & & Bec Polmear) for $10m Australian Dollars, and have pressed it forward to 1.5 m Instagram fans.

They had big success with ‘Flat Stomach Tea’, have pressed out into a few other brands (one called ‘Sneaky Vaunt’ –– a product developed to offer to the wonderbra market). Cravings Suppressant lollipops are their brand-new high margin item, and obviously, they’re pushing that by means of the very same method that worked well for tea.

To put it simply: Kim Kardashian is a huge traffic draw, and therefore all the news sites concentrate on that. Fit+ tie boards of directors do not get traffic, and the reality of the story is much harder to explain, for that reason nobody covered the fact that the people attempting to sell flat stomachs to teen ladies is a group of 4 old people from Maine.

Individuals are complimentary to eat as they select, to desire to look how they choose, to buy as they pick, and really to –– within the bounds of the law –– promote items as they pick. However, if you accept the reality that marketing works & & is successful in changing behavior, it feels an embarrassment that these 4 old guys from Maine have selected to pay somebody with big influence to convince teenage girls that flat stomachs must be one of their huge concerns in order to offer $30 bags of lollipops.