Brands Under the Influence

How sources of influence are evolving and what brands can do in response.

Marketing is ultimately a game of influence, but the source of influence is rapidly shifting from mass media and established cultural gatekeepers to digital platforms and influencers. As the media landscape continues to fragment, attention is being scattered across platforms, creating new opportunities for brands to capture attention and exert influence. The rise of direct-to-consumer brands like Everlane and Away is a prime example of this shift in how branding and distribution models adapt to this new reality.

With the influencer economy nearing saturation on key platforms, the future of influence lies in context, expertise, and diversification. Each factor requires brand marketers to reconsider their consumer relationships and how they aim to influence their target audiences. After all, we live in an interesting time where everyone can become an influencer, so who truly has influence?

From Monoculture to Democratized Influence

Mainstream culture used to be a lot simpler. During the broadcast era, the “big three” oligopoly of network television stations (NBC, CBS, ABC) could rely on a captive audience week after week, and brands could leverage this predictability of attention to pipe a stream of messaging and products into homes. The broadcast TV era was characterized by mono-culture, where consumers were consuming the same television programs from the same network channels, and therefore watching the same commercials and buying the same brands. Advertising used to do what we traditionally thought it would do — that is, drive culture from the top down. And consumers had no mechanism to deliver feedback to brands other than with their wallets. It used to be a lot easier for brands to influence consumer behavior.

It used to be a lot easier for brands to influence consumer behavior.

The mono-culture paradigm began to shift around the 90s, when the rise of cable television began to dilute consumers’ media diet with the likes of HBO, MTV, and CNN, with network broadcast share eroding from 90% in the early 1980s to under 50% by 1997. The loss of media concentration foreshadowed the challenge ahead for brands to compete in even more fragmented places for consumer attention.

The internet, and especially mobile, accelerated this attention fragmentation. The average U.S. consumer owns 13 connected devices and splits their 11 hours of daily media time between social media, OTT, digital video, gaming consoles, and other smartphone-based apps. As a result, consumers no longer have to simply accept trends from the top down, because they have access to so many other platforms at their fingertips. NBC, ESPN, Vogue, and other established media outlets are no longer the ubiquitous, singular voice in their categories. Culture and trends now happen bottoms-up with an ever-growing number of people, publishers, and places, making it possible for consumers to find (and influencers to monetize) hyper-niche areas of interest.

Culture and trends now happen bottoms-up with an ever-growing number of people, publishers, and places, making it possible for consumers to find hyper-niche areas of interest.

Influencers were born out of this digital-native democratization of culture, first with bloggers and most recently with social media influencers. Anyone with a smartphone and an opinion could be an influencer, and influencers have been able to capitalize on this shift in attention. Influencer marketing is a $3–6 billion market globally, with $1.6 billion on Instagram alone. Aside from Instagram, influencers have concentrated their efforts on platforms with high usage like YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, and more recently Twitch and TikTok. Advancements in targeting and content discovery technology on social platforms make it easier for influencers to amass audiences, and new creator tools like Patreon make it easier to monetize audiences.

The reason the influencer market has taken off is that influence follows attention, and they’ve been massively successful in influencing consumer behavior: brands earned $6.50 for every dollar spent on influencer marketing, with 70% of brand marketers reporting they’re planning on increasing influencer marketing budgets this year. In this way, consumers signal to brands where they should be reaching them by virtue of time spent and engagement, not the other way around.

Brands as Influencers

People aren’t the only ones that can be influential — brands can also influence behavior, disrupt industries, and create movements of their own. Direct-to-consumer (D2C) companies like Glossier, Warby Parker, and Casper are gaining not just share of market, but cultural velocity as well. According to a study by Bain & Company, 34 of the world’s 50 biggest consumer companies are suffering either from slowing sales and profits (or both), with $20 billion in value transferring from established brands to D2C upstarts, marking the outsize impact they’ve had on culture in the last 3–5 years. So what’s their secret? These D2C brands act like a best friend that gives consumers access to an “in-the-know” lifestyle, with beautifully designed products that create a sense of belonging and feel like they were curated exclusively for each individual consumer.

The rise of these micro-communities and the democratization of culture facilitates a sort of self-curation, where consumers are trading static cultural norms for a mix of high and low that’s uniquely theirs. And as trends pollinate across categories, the new icons are self-made hybrids — architects that DJ, models that skate, musicians that cook. Because of this fragmentation, it’s harder than ever for any one idea or movement to break through and truly influence culture, but when an idea does gain traction and take off, mobile and social work as fuel poured on the cultural fire, accelerating movements from niche to mass seemingly instantaneously.

So what makes something influential in culture these days? How do ideas cut through the clutter and capture attention? We can look to today’s sources of influence, whether they’re people or brands, for smart solutions.

Influencers In The Digital Age

First, these sources of influence highlight the intersectional nature of today’s culture and present ideas in unexpected, collaborative ways, like Coca Cola’s sneaker collaboration with Converse and Kith, or Virgil Abloh’s exclusive collaboration with IKEA. They are also shareable — if consumers don’t Instagram it, did it even happen? Restaurants like Cha Cha Matcha and Black Tap and brands like Away and Quip design products and spaces meant to look good in photos, and generate earned and shared media. They also benefit from a strong feedback loop of digital ads, which inform those brands on how to optimize their next direct-response campaign, customer acquisition strategy, and even product design.

Next, they stand for something, like Allbirds or Everlane’s Renew recyclable product line; not standing for something is a message in and of itself. They are also co-conspiratorial, in the sense that consumers want to be involved in the development and curation of brands. Outdoor Voices invites its fan base to be a part of its creative process, developing product lines based on social media feedback. New tools like Clique Media’s “co-curation-as-a-service” offering pairs brands with audience data from their sites WhoWhatWear and MyDomaine to inform product design, materials, and marketing.

We could be, though, reaching influencer saturation, with 52% of Millennials saying their trust in influencers is decreasing. Much of it has to do with the concentration of platforms, with 78% of influencers relying on Instagram as their primary channel. Which begs the question, when everyone has access to influence (even robots!), who truly has influence? And while social media algorithms have advanced far enough to enable hyper-targeted messaging, they’re not yet sophisticated enough to deliver truly 1:1 product recommendations. The result is a new type of mono-culture that feels like it gives consumers access to a bespoke, aspirational collective, but really just looks like a bunch of twenty-somethings in Outdoor Voices dragging their Away suitcases through the airport on the way to Reykjavik, documenting the whole trip on Instagram with images that closely resemble those before them.

The result is a new type of mono-culture that  feels like it gives consumers access to a bespoke, aspirational collective.

The future of influence lies in context, expertise, and diversification. Sources of influence, whether they’re people or brands, will need to go beyond savvy marketing, a smartphone camera, and a good eye. They’ll need to demonstrate that they have the context required to spot emergent trends and shape-shift culture with an eye towards where it’s heading, and must demonstrate this expertise over a sustained period of time. Doing so will enable them to dream up the types of products and experiences that give consumers what they didn’t even know they needed, and in doing so safeguard future influence.

The future of influence lies in context, expertise, and diversification.

Also, because Instagram is the primary platform of influence across many categories, what happens if Instagram changes, or attention shifts away from Instagram or the other dominant platforms? This shift is entirely possible if we look to the past, when Facebook changed their homepage algorithm and sent many Facebook-dependent news publishers searching for solutions. The influencers that stay relevant going forward will closely monitor where consumer attention is shifting and deliver medium-appropriate content accordingly. We’re already starting to see audience attention moving towards platforms that require more active curation like podcasts and newsletters (versus passive, anonymous scrolling on Facebook and Twitter), which enable direct connections to consumers where they’re demonstrating they’re willing to spend additional media time. Diversifying away from the few dominant platforms will demonstrate an influencer’s intimate knowledge of their audience and an ability to stay ahead of culture.

How Brands Can Amass & Exert Influence

Eventually, some of these niche trends and brands will get so big that they get picked up by mass culture and lose a bit of the hype value that makes them special. Brands that are savvy enough to intercept influence as momentum is building will continue to maintain relevance with the next generation(s) of consumers. There are a few ways brands can get ahead and stay ahead of the hype, and influence consumers and culture in this new era.

Brands that are savvy enough to intercept influence as momentum is building will continue to maintain relevance with the next generations of consumers.

First, consumers don’t think in silos, and brands should mirror that behavior and think about the areas their audience cares about beyond their core product category. For example, Coach put on an experiential event called Life Coach, knowing that their young, urban female audience cares about the emerging trends of tarot cards and crystals as much as they do handbags.

Next, brands should pay attention to changes in social behavior that result from influential movements as much as the movement itself. For example, Pokemon Go showed consumers’ propensity for outdoor, social AR experiences and HQ Trivia showed how snackable, habitual games can power people’s breaks in the day — brands can leverage these behavioral insights as clues to build cultural moments that influence consumers, even if aligning with Pokemon Go or HQ Trivia at this point would be past its prime.

Lastly, brands can invite consumers to participate, whether through social media or more focused co-curation sessions with their most loyal consumers. Brands should think about co-curation less as a one-off tactic or PR stunt, and more as a strategic feedback channel that allows them to get out of chasing the hype cycle and closer to the source of trends about to pop. Doing so will not only help brands create products and marketing more closely aligned with consumers’ tastes, but consumers will be more likely to share if they’re involved in the actual building of the brand. Doing so will help brands influence cultural moments, or create their own, and stay relevant with consumers.