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THE ORIGINS OF INFLUENCE IN THE MODERN WORLD

While influencer marketing has become a popular buzzword in today’s marketing circles, the fundamental concept has been prevalent in marketing throughout history. Tapping into the power of someone with authority, an audience, and followers to spread one’s message is the foundation of marketing. The ways people consume their messaging and the ways those who hold influence communicate have changed over time. The present state of digital media has transformed the ways people communicate and the ways your message can be heard. Influencer marketing encompasses strategies to engage people with your message in a more trusted manner with a longer term perspective.

THE HISTORY OF INFLUENCER MARKETING

The concept of leveraging celebrities or those with influence to endorse or promote a product has been fundamental for centuries. In the 1760s, Josiah Wedgwood impressed the Queen of Great Britain, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, enough with his new form of earthenware that she gave him permission to call it Queenware, making it the first documented endorsement.¹ The approval of the royal family certainly helped Wedgwood establish itself as a brand of choice.

When John Jaques and Nathaniel Cook designed a new set of chess pieces in 1849, they approached the English chess master Howard Staunton to write about the set in his newspaper column.² Having a current chess master endorse the chessmen in his column would be a coup in spreading the news about their new design. It went even better than planned: Staunton was so impressed with the pieces he not only covered and endorsed them but derided other designs. Eventually this early celebrity endorsement broadened, to the point where Staunton signed the sets as they were sold and received a royalty from each sale. The pieces are still the standard used in competition chess today.

In the late 1800s, companies began to print trade cards to include with their products. For instance, famous actors such as James Lewis and Mrs. G. W. Gilbert were shown in one of their best-known stage roles—but holding a bottle of Ayer’s Sarsaparilla.³

British-American actress Lillie Langtry was linked to multiple brands including Pears Soap.⁴ Mark Twain lent his name to cigars and other tobacco goods.⁵

THE RISE OF MASS MEDIA AND INFLUENCER MARKETING

The twentieth century rise of mass media including radio and television allowed for all marketing, including celebrity endorsements, to become much more widespread. Tobacco companies were early adopters of the format with James Stewart and Ronald Reagan endorsing brands like Chesterfields.⁶ Athletes like Babe Ruth also endorsed tobacco products.⁷ Alfred Hitchcock endorsed Western Union telegrams for swift communication from on-set.⁸

One of the most visible product endorsements, and one that undoubtedly changed the approach to sports endorsements, was the partnership between Nike and Michael Jordan. Nike had a stronghold on the track and field shoe market but were strangers to the basketball market when they signed Michael Jordan in 1984. The visibility of Jordan and his on-court accomplishments helped Nike grow to the brand we know today. Jordan’s position and devotion to his role as the face of Nike reached something of a watershed moment during the 1992 Olympics. The Team USA uniforms were sponsored by Reebok. Jordan felt that he shouldn’t stand on the dais to receive the gold medal while wearing a competitor’s logo. Instead, he went into the crowd before the medal ceremony and asked fans for flags from the USA to drape over his shoulder, obscuring the Reebok logo.⁹

The Jordan signature shoe changed the playing field for sports brands in the early 1980s. Before then, most NBA players wore the same Chuck Taylor All-Star shoe no matter how big of a player they were, from Bill Russell to Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson to Julius Erving. Now close to twenty active NBA players have signature shoe lines. Even non-athletes have signature shoes, such as Kanye West designing sneakers with both Nike and Adidas.¹⁰

PEOPLE TRUST PEOPLE

People trust people—that’s the principle at work here. Humans are social beings. We communicate with people, even when it’s online and digital. We trust people over messages from companies, corporations, or brands. Nielsen finds the most powerful and relied-on source of trust comes from people, with 92 percent of people likely to trust a recommendation from a friend.¹¹ The next most-trusted source (70 percent) is consumer reviews online, another form of listening to a trusted person. Editorials by editors, authors, or journalists were the third most trusted source.

For brands, garnering trust means winning business.

The Edelman Trust Barometer clearly spells out the importance of trust and its impact on our purchasing decisions as consumers.¹² When consumers were asked about their deciding factor for doing business with a brand, trusting the brands was the fifth popular response after key product attributes such as quality, convenience, value, and ingredients.

How does a brand best gain the trust of consumers in a digital-first world? Celebrity endorsements were the traditional choice because they make it easier to align your brand with elements of the celebrity’s image and their popularity. The glamor and power of the celebrity’s identity and brand transfers to the product. It’s success and class by association. It’s easy to trust a current chess master on the best kinds of chessmen. It’s why Nike had a $1.6 million increase in the golf market because of its ties to Tiger Woods, despite a scandal that caused other sponsors to drop him.¹³ Jordan’s continuing celebrity and brand as an all-time basketball great means Nike continues to release Jordan shoes and sell astronomical numbers despite the fact Jordan hasn’t played an NBA game since 2003.

Celebrity power lasts because it’s based on people with authority. This is where influencer marketing enters the picture and is beginning to compete with celebrity endorsements for marketing budgets. Edelman Trust Barometer looked at the 18–to–34 predominately millennial demographic and found that not only was relatability to a given influencer twice as important to their popularity or celebrity status, but also a whopping 63 percent trusted what influencers said about products more than what brands say about themselves.

It should then come as no surprise that in a more recent study, 82 percent of consumers said they were very likely to follow the recommendation of an influencer they follow, which shows that trust translates digitally.¹⁴ Twitter has even reported that users trust influencers nearly as much as their own friends.¹⁵

Clearly the ancient concept of trust combined with advances in digital technology has brought upon an incredible transformation of how we decide who to do business with and who influences us in our purchasing decisions.

HOW THE INTERNET CHANGED INFLUENCE

We’ve seen the internet change how people communicate and get information. Specific knowledge is now gained with great speed, and communication happens at an unprecedented rate. Over the last decade, social media has fundamentally changed how people communicate, streamlining social interaction while lowering barriers between everyday people. Smartphones mean online access from anywhere at any time of the day, not just at home or in the office. The ease of content creation, publication, and distribution has democratized fame modeling, and hundreds of thousands of influencers have emerged. Celebrity status isn’t required. A person can claim status as an Instagram celebrity simply because they have thousands of followers.

At the same time, studies show certain groups of consumers trust celebrity endorsements less than before.¹⁶ Celebrity endorsements won’t go away or fade completely—they’ve been a tentpole of influencer marketing for over a century. Some of the skepticism comes from celebrities not aligning with their own identity and the engagement clearly being an ad. Celebrity influencers have received backlash, also, for when the endorsement comes across as not natural. In the case of the Fyre Festival, the influencers were paid for their promotion of the festival without disclosing that their posts were ads.¹⁷ The spectacular failure of the event reflected back on the influencers whose credibility then took a hit. The skepticism came from the impersonal, transactional nature of the engagement.

Minority groups in particular are becoming wary of traditional celebrity endorsement. Brad Pitt may be a film star, but his endorsement can be pointless if your brand aims for a smaller demographic that doesn’t connect with, or trust, a Hollywood actor. As a result, more people are turning to alternative sources for information they trust. Some of these are bloggers and “everyday experts”—people the consumer identifies with on a personal, friendly basis, someone “more like me.” The rise of the “mommy blogger” phenomenon is an example of this. For a brand wanting to connect with new mothers, engaging with an “everyday influencer” in a niche market like mommy bloggers might bring far more benefits than an association with a Hollywood star. Google itself has already stated that, for millennials who spend a lot of time watching online videos, YouTube stars are already more influential than traditional celebrities.¹⁸

All of this is driving influencer marketing in a new direction. More than two-thirds of millennial consumers value peer endorsement over those from celebrities.¹⁹ As influencer marketing begins to mature and see the value that non-celebrity “peer” influencers bring, it is no surprise that 94 percent of marketers now think that transparency and authenticity are key to influencer marketing success.²⁰

An agency manager handling the #IGNITEYourCity influencer marketing campaign for the running shoe company Puma said it best: “We felt that actually getting those real life runners in our target markets speaking for Puma would be a more authentic way to deliver our message than simply putting out promotional material.”²¹

New companies have emerged to help marketers discover, engage, and measure activities associated with influencers in this new landscape. The sheer number of potential influencers forces us to scale beyond human capabilities to better understand many social media users’ influence over a wide range of communities discussing almost anything imaginable. These same tools help you target the demographics important to you. Engaging a celebrity endorsement from Brad Pitt would be a game-changer for most companies, but it wouldn’t suit every brand or product from a target audience, cultural alignment, or budget perspective. Tapping into these smaller markets is more powerful for niche brands. You can reach further through harnessing the influence of everyday experts with powerful influence over unique communities.

Influencer marketing can engage both celebrities and noncelebrities. The concepts in this book are applicable to anyone with a platform and an audience. Social media has democratized both media authority and its influence. The influencer is seen as more trustworthy because of their authenticity, or their “everyday person” type of testimonial. The rise of networks like Pinterest and Instagram that cater to more specific demographics, along with the prevalence of YouTubers and bloggers with opinions suited to smaller and more precise audiences, has shifted marketer and consumer attention to micro-influencers. It’s no longer vital to aim for the largest demographic. Targeting specific audiences open to your message can be more efficient.

THE ADDITIONAL BENEFITS OF INFLUENCER MARKETING IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Would encouraging people to talk to their friends about your product or brand organically over coffee each day add to your marketing campaign? If they talked to their friends in social media about your product, the viral power of that communication would only work to your benefit.

Engaging with an audience through influencer marketing strategies has the same effect. While leveraging influencers for traditional time-limited marketing campaigns is still widespread, there is greater value in establishing relationships with influencers to build a larger social media community. People share your message on social media to a whole field of people they influence whenever they interact with your brand on a regular basis. Over time, organic engagement with your product increases, and you will successfully leverage other people including consumers, employees, advocates, and friends into helping spread your message through the channels that most people spend most of their online time in.

Influencer marketing is the extension of a tried and tested form of marketing that works. The popularity of social media and resulting democratization of influence has transformed the way companies need to adapt in order to continue to reap its benefits.

Nordstrom shows us what the future might look like for those that adapt. One study showed that four out of every five of mobile web visits and nearly 40 percent of desktop visits to retailer Nordstrom.com’s site that were referred from another site were driven by an influencer.²² But are they just visiting or are influencers actually influencing purchasing decisions?

The results of a recent survey by global e-commerce company Rakuten paint a clear picture of how the resulting digital democratization of influence has influenced purchasing.²³ Of the 3,600 shoppers surveyed in the United States, Europe, and Australia, 61 percent interacted with an influencer daily and 35 percent multiple times a day. Nearly 90 percent of surveyed consumers said they were inspired to make a purchase based on what they saw from an influencer, and 80 percent actually made a purchase recommended by an influencer by clicking on the link or image. When probed further for details, 74 percent of consumers surveyed spent up to $629 on a single purchase that was inspired by an influencer they follow.

All of this data indicates that these trends provide unparalleled opportunities for marketers who can tap into the growing commercial influence of this new generation of digital influencers. If nearly three-quarters of luxury goods purchases, whether they take place in physical stores or online, are influenced by what consumers do online, you can begin to gauge the enormous potential influencer engagement has for your brand.²⁴ That influence will only grow as McKinsey has estimated that in the long-term, what consumers do online will influence 99 percent of online and offline purchasing decisions.