Digital Disruption: Why Influencers are More Believable than Brands

Have you ever looked at your life and wondered how lucky you were to be alive… to savor some stupendous moments? Well, the richest of lives are made of moments and this is one those times! One day you will look back with nostalgia and be glad that you lived to witness a time when brands were only as strong as influencers said they were!

Today, you put two infomercials on a pedestal with the same script but by promoted by two different sources and you will get a whole world of differences in the way the message was received. The gap only widens when one of the promoters is the brand owner and the other an influencer. The brand manager in such an arrangement is a miserable underdog.

It came without a bellwether, without a sign to prepare the professionals and brands of things to come. If there was any, no one cared to notice, after all, we were long made to believe everything that came from the radio, and when it was printed in the newspapers, it had to be the truth. That was just a few years ago, today, newspaper stories are read with a pinch of salt, and the radio has been commercialized to the last tune.

Celebrity Radio Hosts

As a matter of fact, most Radio stations would settle for (if not prefer) a celebrity or influencer with a large following as a presenter than have a trained journalist. It is all about the money, skills and education come secondary as it turns out that most of the so-called influencers, never stepped into any marketing communication’s class.

As a matter of fact, most Radio stations would settle for (if not prefer) a celebrity or influencer with a large following as a presenter than have a trained journalist. It is all about the money, skills and education come secondary as it turns out that most of the so-called influencers, never stepped into any marketing communication’s class.

Moreover, some of them are not able to construct a simple grammatical sentence but command a huge loyal following, nonetheless. Just this week, a local Radio station was forced to apologize for some regrettably silly remarks made by one of its presenters.

We have individuals who started off as socialites, others as clueless keyboard warriors who barely made it past O Level but made a breakthrough online thanks to a thirsty audience - craving for this new sensation called twira! But we use them because they are effective, their ROI far surpasses the degrees, masters and PHDs. You can spend 100k on radio mentions and close zero deals from it but try investing half of that in a good influencer and let her put out just one post and the difference will be clear.

Covert Advertising

The next time somebody asks you out and insists that you go to a particular joint, watch out, chances are that you will be falling right into a covert influencer’s pitch.

Today rather than spread the marketing and advertising budgets too thin, many outlets prefer to pay influencers - mostly on commission, based on the numbers of patrons they attract. And one sure way to show the numbers as an influencer is to get ten friends come over every month, eating out from the top of the menu.

Well, one may argue that this new trend is a result of the change in marketing communications dynamics and that social media has completely altered the way we do business. But frankly speaking, this is just hype and sheer cliché, I believe that people and not digital caused this shift. It is more of a psychographic metamorphosis. 

And yet there have been numerous studies flying around giving credit to this trend. According to a study by Harris Interactive released in 2014, “92% of consumers trust recommendations from others, even people they don’t know, over branded content.” 92 by all standards is a huge number of customers.

Communicator’s Nightmare

As a Marketing Communications professional, one problem keeps you awake every other day – how to read and understand consumer behavior! You wonder why people are not receptive to your paid adverts but would easily believe an influencer or just about anyone with a handful of online followers. This is every communicator’s nightmare!

I will assess and attempt to breakdown this mystery with the hope of not solving it, but starting a conversation around this topic, because if what we see today is anything to go by, this social disruption is poised to remain with us for a very long time.

These days, maxims like credibility, authenticity, believability, among others are qualities not controlled by brand managers anymore but by an exogenous delegated function, by third parties who sometime command absolutely zero knowledge about the product and care less about it other than regurgitating what is fed to them and pocketing the money they will receive.

Marketing and Sales Speaking Different Languages

When one day we will be frank with ourselves and do an honest analysis of things, we will be able to pinpoint exactly where the rain started beating us. When that will be done, with the wisdom of hindsight, I can bet with absolute certainty that it will not be far from the divergent parlance of marketing and sales people

When one day we will be frank with ourselves and do an honest analysis of things, we will be able to pinpoint exactly where the rain started beating us. When that will be done, with the wisdom of hindsight, I can bet with absolute certainty that it will not be far from the divergent parlance of marketing and sales people.

Marketers sometime if not all the time, get ahead of themselves trying to convince the buyer how good the product is. Reality however dawns on the consumer when (s)he arrives at the shop and get a completely different reception. Some as bad as the product not being available yet the airwaves and billboards are ablaze with all the scripted promos about this new wonder product in the market.

When Brands Lie

Now when brands promise more than they can deliver, that is an acceptable failure, in fact it has become the norm these days. Few brands promise exactly what they know they will deliver.

We see this every day, more so in real estate with the most misused buzzword being ‘Green’. Even rocky, dusty, plots that have not had a drop of rain for yonks, are promoted as ‘something’ green!

In most cases brands promise the ideal future and not necessarily what is available now. Look around you, I am sure you will see one or two billboards selling houses, but it is only when you look closer that you will be able to read the small printed disclaimer – ‘Show House Ready for Viewing’. It will be ten years before you can sleep in that house! That is not a good thing, but acceptable since it has been done repeatedly, even by respectable names.

We see this every day, more so in real estate with the most misused buzzword being ‘Green’. Even rocky, dusty, plots that have not had a drop of rain for yonks, are promoted as ‘something’ green!

Lying in marketing communication terms is when a brand releases a copy that deliberately sells air. The plot thickens when this lying streak persists even at the customer care section. I want to believe that this is one of those sections that would be hardest hit if ever AI was to replace the human face. Most customer care teams have scripts or what they call FAQs, you ask for this, the answer is this.

If ever these individuals would be allowed to speak their mind, some of the responses would silence and erase Safaricom’s ER for good. I know this because I once headed a customer care team including those who handle the company’s hotline. How hot that line is will be a topic for another day!

What brands refuse to learn is that when the product is not working, no amount of PR and marketing is going to change perceptions or make sales move. The best form of marketing is the product itself, doing the things that the marketing pitch said it would do! What better place to get this affirmation than from an influencer who claims to have used it and it worked for him?

The other place where online influencers and bloggers beat brands at their game is on time. While the brands will be drafting scripts, polishing and passing them through internal approvals before it can become reader-ready, the influencer will have taken a photo in a poorly lit room and posted it accompanied with some carelessly crafted text. Broken English has a way of passing off as honesty!

By the time the communique from the brand manager hits the market, it will be too little too late since the audience will have been sold to the early bird. When the best pitch is not available, the available becomes the best!

Simple is Today’s Complex

Finally, as professionals become more educated or having attended a workshop recently where certain complex concepts were shared, brands tend to be more and more complicated in the way they communicate.

Who has the time to try and understand your complex messages whereas the influencer can easily break it down and even translate it in the local dialect if need be? They do this in Uganda everyday, including translating movies from English to Luganda!

Who has the time to try and understand your complex messages whereas the influencer can easily break it down and even translate it in the local dialect if need be? They do this in Uganda everyday, including translating movies from English to Luganda!

Picture this narrative of a company’s bio on twitter: “Providing governments & commercial organizations with products and services that underpin the integrity of trade, personal identity and the movement of goods.” Why not simply say “we you print money” then use up the remaining space to say other interesting things about your company?

We can wish them away or vilify them but the one thing we know for sure is that they are not going anywhere, the role of influencers will only grow in times to come. Today according to a 2017 report, less than seven hundred thousand Kenyans are actively on Twitter every month, yet influencers are so powerful!

To survive in business, you must imagine how things will be when this figure rises to five million active users! It is already happening out there. Until then, its an influencer’s world and yours to lose!

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