Influencer marketing is big business: here are five mistakes the stars (and the brands who sponsor them) should avoid
Using social media celebrities to advertise products – influencer marketing – is a lucrative and rapidly growing industry, projected to be worth up to US$15 billion (£10.7 billion) by 2022.
Influencers profit from their online fame by collaborating with brands, endorsing products to their followers in return for a payment (or free goods and experiences).
Some influencers are established stars seeking an additional income stream (the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, charges up to US$1.6 million (£1.2 million) for an endorsement on Instagram). Others may have recently found fame on reality TV shows like Love Island, an experience which can spark a barrage of endorsement deals.
But among the most successful influencers are ordinary consumers who have risen to fame on social media, often within a specific community. For instance, Zoella’s make-up hauls gained traction within the YouTube beauty community, earning her 11 million channel subscribers. “Cleanfluencer” Mrs Hinch, meanwhile, boasts 4.1 million Instagram followers eager for cleaning tips.
These community-based influencers develop high levels of audience trust, making them attractive as brand endorsers. Yet their particular origins have important implications for influencer marketing.
We studied consumer responses to brand endorsements by leading UK-based beauty vloggers on YouTube, including Zoella, Lily Pebbles, and FleurDeForce. Our research revealed that because fellow members of a wider online community played a key role in their rise to fame, these influencers were seen to have distinct responsibilities to their viewers.
We found that brand endorsements that failed to take these responsibilities into account could backfire, causing reputational damage to both the influencers themselves and the companies they represent.
Here are the five most common influencer marketing mistakes we identified:
1. Inadequate disclosure
Influencers are expected to clearly disclose endorsement activities to their viewers, enabling them to distinguish them from organic content. Viewers expressed frustration when they felt the difference was not made clear.
Endorsement disclosure by influencers is a concern for regulators, and a key focus of an ongoing enquiry into influencer culture by the UK government. Followers were quick to identify instances when influencers didn’t follow the current UK guidance for endorsement disclosure.
They also had additional expectations. For instance, many followers expected influencers to verbally disclose endorsements, noting that they often multitask whilst watching YouTube videos and could easily miss written disclosures.
While influencers bore the brunt of the blame for insufficient disclosure, any resulting negativity could also be passed on to the brand.
2. Inauthenticity
Some followers felt influencers had a responsibility to ensure the majority of their videos were “organic” and unbiased by endorsements. They were sensitive to the ratio of organic to endorsed content on the influencer’s YouTube channel, and responded negatively when product promotion began to dominate.
One commented: “All other YouTubers I watch put ads in their videos too which is totally fine, but every video seems a bit excessive. It also makes us question which products you genuinely like.”
This illustrates the doubts over influencer authenticity. While this mistake did not cause reputational damage to the endorsed brand, it led consumers to perceive these influencers sceptically, likely reducing their effectiveness as endorsers.
3. Overemphasis
Influencers are seen as having a responsibility to provide valuable content. We found that followers are critical of brands they believe have taken a high level of control over the influencer’s content, particularly where this detracts from viewer enjoyment. For instance, they responded negatively when they sensed the influencer had been given a script or asked for a high frequency of product mentions.
One response read: “Loved the vlog. Hated the OTT mentions of the product. At first I was interested in it but after the third mention I was thinking, ‘How bad can this product be to need to pay for X number of mentions?’. Once or twice would be enough. But I assume the company asked to be named more than necessary.”
Influencers should be granted a high level of creative freedom over how a product is featured, enabling them to produce endorsements their viewers will enjoy.
4. Brand fatigue
Influencers’ responsibility to provide valuable content was also jeopardised when brands commissioned many influencers within the community to post similar endorsements in quick succession. Saturating the target audience in this way was seen as repetitive and boring, likely reducing endorsement effectiveness.
Indeed, many claimed that they would avoid purchasing from brands guilty of this mistake. Companies should avoid selecting a large number of influencers within the same online community for a campaign, and pay attention to scheduling. Again, allowing the influencer creative control is likely to produce more varied endorsements, reducing brand fatigue.
5. Overindulgence
Fans felt that influencers receiving excessive amounts of freebies (such as luxury holidays and large quantities of free merchandise) made any resulting endorsements less trustworthy. Consumers even complained that the cost of these expensive influencer incentives would increase the retail price of the brand’s products.
Many followers expressed negative sentiment towards these brands and planned to avoid them. Businesses should either scale back influencer incentives or ensure such endorsement activities benefit other members of the community through competitions or giveaways.
Overall, careful attention to influencer selection, as well as campaign timing and execution, will enable brands to avoid the risk of backlash from their target audience and increase the impact of their campaigns.
Rebecca Mardon, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Cardiff University; Hayley Cocker, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Lancaster University, and Kate Daunt, Professor of Marketing, Cardiff University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Instagram Kids: tech development must move from usability to safety
Facebook has announced that it is halting development on its Instagram Kids project. This follows reports that the social media giant had commissioned – and kept secret – internal research that found Instagram was detrimental to young people’s mental health.
The study’s findings, not to mention the fact that they were withheld, have only bolstered the heavy criticism the project initially came in for. “Instagram for kids,” ran one headline early on, “the social media site no one asked for”.
Quite who has asked for what, in information technology development, is an interesting question. In the late 1980s, research had already highlighted that the history of computers was arguably one of creating demand more than responding to need. And social media is no different: it has gone from being the thing we didn’t know we wanted to being embedded in all that we do. Research increasingly confirms it can be a source of harm too.
Children are at the heart of this battle between usefulness and safety. They’re the future designers of our tech – they will inherit our messes – but they’re also using it right now. And they’re tech companies’ future customers. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri has been quick to defend the value and importance of a kids’ version of the app. But can we trust big tech to give us what we actually need as opposed to manipulating us into consuming what they need to sell?
The advent of usability
The concept of user experience now dominates information technology thinking. But the earliest home computers were anything but useful, or usable, for the average person. That is primarily because they were still being designed for trained specialists: they assumed competence in whomever switched them on.
From the early 1980s, parents were encouraged to embrace the educational potential of home computing. They saw the devices as a boost to their children’s learning and future employability. But this uptake in early devices was still more conceptual than practical.
By the end of the 1980s, however, the idea of usability started to gain traction. IT design started focusing more on how average people might effectively and efficiently use their products, with computer scientists homing in on human-computer interaction and user-centered design.
From user experience to user safety
Technology, of course, now enables how we live, how we communicate, how we interact, how we work. Households are filled with devices and applications which are usable, useful and being used. Indeed, keeping devices and all they contain in use is central to IT design: the user is a customer and the tech is designed to nurture – sollicit, even – that custom.
Figuring out how to provide a meaningful and relevant experience for someone using a digital product or service, from devices to social media platforms, is what is known as user experience design. Tech giants talk about meeting our expectations even before we know them ourselves. And the way designers know what we want before we want it comes down to the data they collect on us – and our children.
A flurry of recent lawsuits, however, highlight the line, in terms of harm to the user, that such digital innovation driven by profit and shaped by our personal data has crossed. These include the case launched by the former children’s commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, against TikTok.
Longfield’s case alleges that the video-sharing platform harvests the personal information of its under-age users for targeted advertising purposes: from date of birth, email and phone number to location data, religious or political beliefs and browsing history.
The concern these days is that privacy is under threat because profits take precedence over safety.
The usability movement which started in the late 1980s therefore now needs to make way for what computer scientists term usable security: human-centric design, where safety takes precedence. Our research shows that many online applications are not fit for use. They fail to find the balance between usability and security (and privacy).
We need to further explore the potential of open-source designs – those not driven by profit – as alternatives. And we need to foster ethical awareness around technology in young minds: they are tomorrow’s programmers. As important as learning to code is understanding the ethical implications of what is being coded.
Fiona Carroll, Reader in Human Computer Interaction, Cardiff Metropolitan University and Ana Calderon, Senior Lecutrer in Computer Science, Cardiff Metropolitan University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Personalisation in ecommerce: expectations vs reality
Expected by consumers but tricky to implement, personalisation can take your brand to the next level.
When talking to retailers, the inspiration for personalisation is to be using technology that is so advanced that entire websites are tailored to the customer, not just content and product recommendations. Some companies are known to achieve such advanced 1:1 personalisation because its departments share information while also utilising captured data to better understand its customers. It may seem unrealistic that smaller retailers could ever accomplish the same, but any company can achieve personalisation on that level by understanding the current obstacles and the technology that exists to fix them.
Current obstacles with personalisation
When it comes to personalisation, 57 per cent are willing to share their data with a company if they get something in return, like personalised offers. In addition, 80 per cent of consumers are more inclined to purchase from a shop when they feel like they are being treated as an individual, and if that message is not felt, 52 per cent are likely to shop somewhere else.
From basic to more advanced options, 89 per cent of digital retailers are investing in personalisation, including AI and machine learning to predict user behaviour. But for many companies, personalisation is a very tedious process, with no better example than product recommendations – the most common area to be personalised on a webshop.
However, these boxes are typically filled manually based on their purpose (‘Complete the purchase’ or ‘Similar items’), placed very low on the page creating minimal impact and not updated as frequently as they should be. Worst of all, some solutions market themselves as using AI but in reality are only using popularity to choose recommendations. Overall, the intent to deliver is there, but the execution of personalisation usually still leaves something to be desired for the consumer and lacklustre results for the retailer.
Personalisation of the future
Clearly, there is a reason for the personalisation hype, but not every company has the resources of the major players in ecommerce to build their own in-house solution. Luckily, many platforms use AI and machine learning to help automate and optimise personalisation.
When choosing a provider, ecommerce companies often face the issue of tech stacks that do not integrate nicely with each other or budget constraints that limit where they can implement personalisation. Either they will choose to personalise just one position on one of their channels, creating minimal impact, or choose different providers to personalise different positions across channels, which end up being siloed when it comes to data sharing. There is nothing wrong with choosing multiple providers, as the data sets all eventually feed into the same company-wide data lake. With AI, this is incredibly important, because the more data the algorithms can use to learn, the more accurate the personalisation will be.
As the personalisation industry grows, constant improvements are being made to make these solutions smarter. However, if your provider is not putting in the right amount of effort to improve the underlying techniques, your personalisation will not stand up to your competitors. Don’t be afraid to challenge your provider to share or explain what goes into its solution.
Ensuring your platforms have appropriate dashboarding and reporting capabilities will be crucial in actually understanding how personalisation is impacting your business. Having all your data and knowledge in one place will allow for a comprehensive overview of the company to allow for the smartest decision-making. On top of this, deep machine learning techniques can offer additional insights and emerging patterns that are unnoticeable to the human eye but can have a huge impact.
Moving forward
Personalisation is an integral part of the customer journey, with consumers expecting it and retailers wanting to exploit it. When evaluating personalisation solutions, it is important to ask these questions:
- Where and how does personalisation fit into your company strategy and resources? Do you know who your key stakeholders are and do you have their support?
- Does every platform or solution in your current technology stack share data with the others?
- Do you have enough consolidated data insights on your customers to make smart decisions to consistently improve your customer experience and engagement? If not, will adding this specific solution help you get there?
- Are your providers innovating and staying current on the latest trends in the industry?
Once your company has gone through these questions and defined the current status quo, you can begin your own journey: implementing personalisation in the most relevant and effective way for your consumers, using a partner that also meets your needs.
Learn more about how Froomle’s modular personalisation can create quick wins for your business.
Looking for inspiration? Take a look at our most recent case study with Colruyt Group.
A digital platform to manage retail business
Edward M Durbin, Director Global Retail Industry Group, VMware
Despite online sales booming last year, retailers are in a desperate race of digital catch-up.
It doesn’t matter whether retailers are big or small, with physical stores or online-only, that source direct or have complex supply chains and logistics to manage; they are all in the same fight when it comes to digital experiences. To win the hearts and minds of consumers, retailers can’t just talk digital; they need to think digital-first.
As Matthew O’Neill, Industry Managing Director at VMware points out, “There is a ready-made digital audience hungry to experience new online services, but they’re not yet excited or compelled by what they’re being offered over the last year. Retailers have a real opportunity to differentiate themselves by taking a digital-first posture, creating apps that attract, engage and retain consumers either online or in their stores. Retailers with digital in their DNA have everything to play for.”
The role of apps is critical. Retailers appear to realise this – a Forrester study noted that 86 per cent of retail CIOs said promoting better customer experience through improved apps is “very” or “extremely” important. Or, as Jarek Matschey, Retail Industry Director EMEA at VMware, puts it “applications are the new storefront for customers, and they are the most important tools for the employees.”
Jarek Matschey, Retail Industry Director EMEA, VMware
The point about employees is an important one, and often overlooked. Giving employees the right tools and access to relevant and timely information not only makes them more productive and allows them to deliver a higher level of service to customers, but also keeps them safer and shows employers care for their well-being. All enabled through apps.
Of course, wanting to deliver better experiences through apps is one thing; being able to actually deliver it is another. Eighty five percent of respondents to the Forrester study said that choosing the right platform for each application (whether on-premises, or private, public or hybrid cloud) was either “very” or “extremely” challenging.
Those CIOs struggling with choosing the right platform need to reset, think about what they actually need their apps to do, and then find the environment that best supports those requirements. It might be they need to capture customer data with an engaging, agile and flexible app that can work across multiple devices and operating systems, so public cloud could be the answer. Yet they then need to keep that data secure and stored in compliance with privacy regulations, so the back end of that app might reside in an on-premises data center. So, rather than being all-in on one type of cloud, they actually need a multi-cloud model which allows them to move apps, workloads and data around as they require it.
What it all comes back to is building a platform. Consumers and employees expect new experiences that make their lives easier – apps are the platform from which to do that. The apps themselves need to be supported by infrastructure that enables them to operate at an optimum level – here, cloud (in all its forms), is the supporting layer. Underpinning all of that is a digital foundation which makes life easier for the retailer – allowing them to
develop and deploy apps, manage multiple clouds, and secure it all, in a consistent manner.
In doing so, retailers can create a platform on which to thrive. Or, as Matschey puts it, “retailers who are able to adapt, who are able to use customer data, create the right applications for their employees to be efficient, create the right apps to interact with their customers, will be the winners.”
Watch the full videos here.
For more information on how VMware can help with your retail modernisation journey, visit VMware’s dedicated retail site or email jmatschey@vmware.com or edurbin@vmware.com.
To read more on key trends from NRF 2021, click HERE to get the e-book.
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM VMWARE
Retailers need to respect consumer privacy or pay the price
Richard Jones, Chief Marketing Officer at Cheetah Digital
As consumer attitudes towards data privacy shift and regulations rise to protect them, it’s up to brands, including retailers, to shift with them. Here’s how.
We’re coming to the end of an era – the data free-for-all era, where marketers could use any means possible to track and target consumers with zero regard for how it made them feel. Right now, as we watch monolithic tech companies shift their entire models to fall in line with privacy regulations and consumer privacy desires, it’s time for retail marketers to shift with them, to a better way of connecting with consumers.
You can’t fake knowing who your consumers are
It used to be that Facebook, Google or third-party integrations would let you personalise campaigns at scale. Marketers could splash their ads and campaigns in front of their intended audience, but they would never have to really know that audience because these platforms did it for them. Now, with the depreciation of the third-party cookie, the blocking of tracking on iOS 14, and other privacy-related actions, it’s time for retail marketers to take charge of their futures by owning their own data.
How the value exchange plays into this strategy
Here’s what Google is advising – know your consumer. In fact, it has recommended that all marketers start building out their own first-party databases and will support those that do. The International Advertising Bureau (IAB) is telling marketers to build these relationships using a value exchange.
What’s a value exchange? Simply put, it’s offering consumers something in exchange for their data – data that you can then use to build out campaigns that appeal to that individual alone. This includes sharing special offers, personalised discounts, exclusive access and more. It goes beyond simply gathering every data point – it’s intentional and done with respect and openness to the consumer about how and when their data will be used (this collected data is known as zero-party data).
The technology to do this is readily available, either through “experience” platforms that make it easy to collect, parse and integrate data into campaigns, or through a loyalty programme that wraps up the data-gathering and rewarding engagement into one platform.
Cheetah Digital’s Customer Engagement Suite (CES) is a tool that puts the value exchange at the heart of its customer engagement strategy. It helps marketers to manage every stage of the customer lifecycle, while sitting atop, and being fed by, a Customer Data Platform (CDP). It offers an Experiences platform, a Messaging platform, a Loyalty platform, and a Personalisation platform all seamlessly integrated to help you understand who your customers are, and gives marketers the tools to connect with consumers at the moment it matters most. It’s the tool that puts data ownership in the hands of the brand marketer instead of third parties.
What if retail marketers don’t change their strategies?
Retail marketers have an abundance of data and they’re some of the best candidates to start collecting the zero-party data that can come from offering a value exchange. They’ve got one of the most engaged audiences – it’s simply a matter of marketers tapping into their existing connections.
Or, they can continue to try and passively work with the walled gardens of third-party platforms. They can sit back as consumers grow tired and fed up with being tracked and snooped on across the internet. They can watch as tech companies and privacy regulations make their current third-party databases obsolete and irrelevant. They can fade into the obscurity of the likes of Sears and RadioShack.
The savviest retail marketers, however, will see this as an opportunity ripe for change. They will digitally transform their data strategies, refocusing their efforts into gathering data and building campaigns that grow their relationships with consumers, because those relationships are what matter. They’re also what will carry brands through the next wild and unpredictable shift in marketing practices.
Set your brand up for success with a future-proofed data strategy, learn more about the Cheetah Customer Engagement Suite by visiting www.cheetahdigital.com.
Cheetah Digital is a cross-channel customer engagement solution provider for the modern marketer. The Cheetah Digital Customer Engagement Suite enables marketers to create personalized experiences, cross-channel messaging, and loyalty strategies, underpinned by an engagement data platform that can scale to meet the changing demands of today's consumer. Many of the world’s best brands, including Neiman Marcus, Hilton, Walgreens, and Williams-Sonoma trust Cheetah Digital to help them drive revenue, build lasting customer relationships, and deliver a unique value exchange throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM CHEETAH DIGITAL
Do you really need more petrol, or toilet paper? There are better ways to take control in a crisis
The beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic saw consumers flocking to the shops to urgently stock up on items such as toilet paper and pasta.
This phenomenon, termed “panic buying”, is now happening again in Britain – but this time it’s fuel that people are after. Continued panic buying is only going to perpetuate any fuel shortages. So what can be done to stop it?
Panic buying is a natural reaction to a stressful experience. In particular, it’s a response to uncertainty. When people feel things are uncertain, they tend to focus on something that gives them a sense of certainty and makes them feel in control.
Of course, most people can’t recruit new lorry drivers or mobilise the army to help with the delivery – but they can stock up on fuel. In taking this action, they feel as if they are doing something proactive, and taking charge of the situation.
Covid-19 has exacerbated uncertainty around what the future may hold and increased anxiety for many people, which is notable given we know existing anxiety is a precursor for panic buying. So when people heard there were concerns about petrol supply, it’s not altogether surprising they began queuing up with extra Jerry cans. People may be more susceptible to this behaviour than usual given the pandemic.
Interestingly, the act of buying can cause the brain to release small amounts of dopamine, sometimes referred to as “the reward chemical”. This too, at least partially, helps to explain the relief people might feel when they finally find a petrol station that still has fuel.
Herd mentality and the media
Humans are social creatures, and as such, we are often influenced by what other people are doing. We observe the choices others make and infer why they act the way they do. We tend to assume that the majority have a better assessment of what’s going on and that panic buying is the correct behavioural choice.
The media can play a pivotal role in preventing panic buying as they tend to guide the public perception of what people in general are doing. Continuous exposure to images of and reports about the long queues at the petrol pumps will see people perceive that “everybody else is doing it”, potentially encouraging them to copy this behaviour. Where possible, this kind of coverage is better off avoided.
Authorities needs to be clear
Precise and thoughtful communication is key to alleviating concerns, and therefore deterring people from panic buying. In this case, the public needs reassurance that there is not going to be a petrol shortage, as well as information about solutions – but it needs to be convincing. For example, announcing that 5,000 HGV drivers will be able to get temporary work visas without stating how they will be recruited may not be seen as entirely credible.
The way language is used can also affect people’s perception of a situation. It’s encouraging to see reports indicating the government has advised councils not to use the terms “panic” or “panic buying” in this discussion. Indeed, widespread use of the word “panic” means we perceive others as panicking. And thinking back to the principles of herd behaviour, we tend to assume others know what they’re doing – and we become more likely to follow suit.
So it’s important that the government, local authorities and the media be careful with the language they use during this time.
Things you can do
If you are in the UK and currently affected by the crisis, ask yourself whether you really need to buy petrol. If you decide you don’t really need to — perhaps you can leave your car at home and take public transport — even this basic thought process is a way of taking charge and reducing anxiety levels.
If you’re concerned about the possibility of not being able to drive your car, it’s a good idea to come up with a plan B. What specifically would you do if you found yourself with an empty tank? Could you perhaps travel to work with a neighbour who still has petrol in their car? Check bus and train routes and travel times to see whether that may be a solution.
By having a specific plan, you will feel as if you are in charge – albeit in a different way – and this might make you feel less inclined to urgently seek petrol.
Cathrine Jansson-Boyd, Reader in Consumer Psychology, Anglia Ruskin University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.