Danger of Influencer Marketing: 4 Warnings for Brand Image

This week, the hidden danger of influencer marketing was on full display, as news of sexual abuse by Cesar Chavez, a champion of farmworkers, caused angst among leaders and community groups that once supported the founder of a movement that raised the nation’s consciousness of the deplorable conditions faced by those who ensure our food supply. California, for instance, wants to change Cesar Chavez Day to Farmworkers Day while democratic politians across the country seek to distance themselves from the scandal of a man once revered.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on using key leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market. Rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers, you instead inspire/hire/pay influencers to get out the word for you.

In many ways, hiring influencers as spokespeople for your brand isn’t much different from hiring a celebrity for your commercial or from giving clothing to celebrities so they’re photographed wearing it.

From a marketing perspective, influence marketing provides two benefits:

• It helps cut through the clutter to reach more of your target market
• It offers a tacit endorsement from the influencers to his/her community

Using microcelebrities has its benefits over using celebrities to endorse your brand.

1. Celebrities are MUCH more expensive
2. People look at celebrity endorsement and know it’s just another form of advertising, while the endorsement of microcelebrities seems more REAL
3. Engagement with these microcelebrities is higher than with celebrities despite the celebrity’s larger community. A recent study showed consumers were 2X as likely to buy based on a recommendation from a blogger as from a celebrity.
4. The appeals of influencers just seem more authentic than those of celebrities, since the message is usually crafted in their own words

According to the Influencer Marketing Report, there’s been a 66% uptick in the use of influencer marketing by brands, including both big and small ones and 50% of brands surveyed said they’re increasing spending for 2017. Trying to capitalize on the popularity, a number of agencies now focus on bringing you influencers, celebrities and microcelebrities, to break through the clutter and convince your target market to part with their hard-earned cash.

Sometimes, influencer marketing is relatively subtle. While it’s not exactly traditional word-of-mouth advertising, which focuses on crafting content likely to go viral, and it’s not as in-your-face as advocate marketing, where a brand incentivizes loyal customers to advocate for the brand, influencer marketing shares many of the same marketing benefits.

First, you find influencers who have a large following among your target market. Next, you market heavily to the influencer in hopes he/she will share your content with their massive following.

As brands became more aggressive about influencer marketing, they went beyond just marketing to influencers; they began supporting them with traditional sponsorships or by buying advertising on their platforms, such as YouTube channels or by paying them to mention or review the brand.

The hidden danger of influencer marketing

Just as with celebrities, your influencers might totally embarrass your brand with their behavior, which is the fundamental danger of influencer marketing we see. For instance, many brands stopped using Tiger Woods to endorse their brands after reports of his massive infidelities hit the press. In other cases, like with Taylor Swift, you get access to her fans and your brand takes on some of her wholesome personality.

It’s the same when you hire an influencer on social media. And, Ad Week contends that these microcelebrities are less likely to do something totally embarrassing than celebrities, who tend to slip up with some regularity.

But recent events suggest brands need more due diligence before they decide to throw in their lot with an influencer. Case in point, PewDiePie.

Here’s what an article in this week’s Ad Week said right after Disney and YouTube dropped support for PewDiePie, a controversial and outlandish YouTube sensation with over 53 million followers, for anti-semitic videos.

Influencers become inextricably tied to brands that advertise with them,”Wijesinghe said. “Whether or not you work with them for paid marketing or happen to advertise on their videos, the standard of vetting should only be getting higher.

And, there’s another danger in influencer marketing beyond them becoming a loose cannon. For instance, you can’t control how an influencer talks about your brand, which may undo a lot of your brand equity with your existing market or damage your efforts to build a cohesive brand image. They might even cause reputational damage by misrepresenting your brand.

And, despite the ROI of influencer marketing, it’s nowhere near as good as word of mouth.

Influencer marketing certainly does pay off. For every dollar spent, you get a $6.50 return in additional earned media. However, it still only generates half the sales of true word-of-mouth. So it boils down to what your company is looking for.

Some experts believe that influencer marketing is about to come crashing down on the brands out there, thinking they’ve found the magic bullet for selling to their target market. Their efforts to work with influencers are creating a system that reduces their ability to influence sales. Brands have no relationship with the influencers, in most cases, and no control over messages shared by them, in all cases. Messages shared by the influencer run the gamut from off-brand to negative, and that’s without consideration of how the actions of the influencer might impact brand image, as with PewDiePie.

This is a recipe for disaster, according to the WSJ. The platforms themselves, including Snapchat and Instagram, have serious reservations about influencer marketing, especially as practiced by the new automated platforms for generating influencer marketing, including TapInfluence. They’re afraid that, when influencer marketing fails, as they predict it will, the brands will abandon advertising on the platform altogether.

Another hidden danger of influencer marketing

Of course, that’s not the only hidden danger of influencer marketing. You might find that this tactic just isn’t right for reaching your company’s goals. In some cases, the risk inherent in the tactic might outweigh potential benefits, such as greater awareness and potential sales. Before you decide to move forward, consider the fit of influencer marketing in your overall marketing strategy.

It’s hard to track the performance

A hidden danger of influencer marketing is the inability to track performance accurately, in most cases. For some companies that use a minimum ROI to decide which marketing strategies are worth continuing, this inability to track the return from influencer marketing means they can’t even determine whether the strategy meets these minimums, let alone determine which influencers are worth keeping and which aren’t pulling their weight.

In addition to poor performance metrics, influencer marketing often takes time before delivering any increase in sales. That’s because influencers primarily help create awareness and a positive brand image. These factors don’t translate into immediate product sales.

It doesn’t work for some niches

While influencer marketing might work well for beauty brands, it might not work well for those selling video games or offering travel services. Seeing an influencer floating on a cruise ship or demonstrating a new lipstick might pique your interest in the product. That’s especially true for products that involve low cost because they often don’t trigger a long period during which consumers compare alternatives and weigh decisions.

However, in specialized markets, such as medical devices or industrial products, finding niche specialists can be challenging, and mass-market influencers have little sway on consumers’ decisions (especially industrial buyers). Instead, these buyers factor the expertise of influencers, technical specs of the product, and recommendations from trusted relationship partners over that of influencers.

High costs

Influencers expect to get paid for their recommendations and endorsements. Thus, a hidden danger of influencer marketing is the high cost associated with the tactic. For instance, one company I work with pays me nearly the equivalent of a year of hosting when my recommendation results in a sale. In this instance, we call this affiliate marketing, but it relies on the same principles as influencer marketing.

Influencers with a large following are expensive. For instance, Mr. Beast earns over $82 million a year on his vast following, while sponsors pay PrestonPlaz nearly as much based on the massive following of users, mostly teens and tweens, who watch him play games.

Control

As mentioned earlier, the biggest danger of influencer marketing is the loss of control. You can’t control what your influencers post about your brand. Attempting to script your influencer promotions almost immediately draws questions about their trustworthiness, which negates the value of their influence. The posts must appear authentic, based on a personal endorsement of your products. Even the inference that influencers are posting in exchange for compensation is enough to damage your brand.

Legal and regulatory issues

New regulations require influencers to clearly identify posts as paid advertisements. You may face the hidden danger of influencer marketing in the form of heavy fines or legal consequences when an influencer fails to conspicuously identify their compensation.

Finding the right influencers

Finding an influencer who has an engaged audience that matches your target market is problematic. For instance, simply having a large following isn’t a guarantee that the community values their opinions or even that the followers are real people and not bots. These bots can even influence the apparent engagement reflected by the influencer’s metrics.

Real examples of the danger of influencer marketing

Pepsi and Kendall Jenner

Pepsi released a commercial starring this supermodel in 2017. In the ad, she appeared to support social justice by joining protesters in facing police and offering them a can of Pepsi, which diffused tensions immediately.

The backlash was fierce. Consumers found the ad disingenuous, trivializing the pain of social injustice by suggesting a can of Pepsi could solve the problems of equity, diversity, and inclusion in seconds. Besides, the celebrity didn’t have a reputation for supporting social justice, unlike real social justice warriors like Jane Fonda (who would likely have refused to appear in the ad). After only 24 hours, Pepsi posted an apology for its tone-deafness.

Morphe

Here we see the danger of influencer marketing on public display when the celebrity commits some heinous act. In this case, James Charles was accused of inappropriate behavior with minors, and admitted that some of the claims were true. The public was immediate in their response and the trending hashtags and posts destroyed the brand. It later filed for bankruptcy.

The Frye Festival

This scandal was so severe that a recent attempt to rebrand the festival was a failure, despite multiple changes made by the organizers. High-profile influencers, including our earlier problem child, Kendall Jenner (don’t companies learn about the danger of influencer marketing from one disaster?), promised a luxury event with prominent headliners, over-the-top accommodations, and every other luxury imaginable in exchange for a hefty ticket price.

Instead, attendees experienced the worst of all possible outcomes. Sandwiches instead of gourmet meals, sparse tents instead of glamping, and waterlogged conditions. The damage was so massive that organizers were jailed for six years on fraud, a Netflix documentary bashed the event, and social media even damaged the reputations of the influencers who recommended the event, showing that the danger of influencer marketing can extend to the influencers themselves.

Addidas

While the company commonly develops excellent marketing campaigns, the one with Naomi Campbell was an epic fail because her Instagram posts were viewed as inauthentic. She didn’t even work to appear to support the brand by copying the instructions sent from the Adidas marketing team, including specific advice on captions, etc that clearly showed they were instructions rather than her own opinions.

Conclusion

• The need to vet influencers – Using automated software to choose your influencers based on the size of their network or other objective facts is a mistake, as Disney found with PewDiePie. And, despite efforts to distance themselves from the video sensation, he’ll likely retain most of his millions of followers, providing the perfect vehicle for revenge against the brands he formerly represented (although he has said nothing to suggest this future course of action).
• Instead, brands need to spend time and expend effort to thoroughly vet influencers. Read/ view their content, check their public affiliations, etc to ensure their values match those of your brand and your target audience. Make sure influencers clearly understand your brand’s personality and what is (or isn’t) acceptable.
• Build authentic relationships – Treat influencers as members of your team, don’t just pay them for doing your messaging. This is a major difference between using celebrities and influencers. Building relationships with influencers helps ensure their messaging stays on point and positive.
• Every day, I get offers from companies seeking mention in this blog. Because I don’t have millions of followers, none of them are offering me $1 million for the favor, but they do offer access to information and executives within the company, infographics, and the like. But none of them have tried to build a relationship that would both increase my desire to include their content or ensure I cover their brand appropriately. More disturbing, several attempts to curry favor by implying that such a relationship does exist. Almost all of these end up in the trash, even those offering money for a mention of their brand.
• Just as a brand needs to be careful of its influencers, influencers need to be careful of the brands they endorse. Hence, building a relationship with the influencer means attracting a higher quality influencer who likely has built trust with their followers, which likely translates into sales.

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