Imagine this: You are road-tripping with your friends, filming short clips of the absurdity so that one day when you’re all grown up you can look back at it and laugh. The video makes it online, and it catches like wildfire across the internet. The next thing you know you have millions of followers watching your vlog channel and companies are pounding at your door to feature their products. You are an influencer, and it is time to cash in.
Influencers are social media powerhouses for marketing across the world. These self-made individuals often times came into fame with a timely mishap and a bit of dumb luck, but recognized the opportunity and grasped it. Now, these millionaire millennials live their lives in the public eye and because of the interest they’ve garnered with their slapstick posts, they are rewarded handsomely to be seen using a particular product. For people like Logan Paul, it is the simplest of careers: just continue doing what you’re doing, but do it using our product. For marketers looking for massive reach with little effort, it is an easy way get your product seen, and seen in a way it has likely never been seen before.
Not only do influencers change the way that your products are seen, they reach perhaps the most elusive of demographics to capture: millennials. Paul, the 22 year old YouTube ‘sensation’ with about 16 million followers is thought to be worth roughly 6 million dollars – simply because his childish and often times awkward behavior reaches out to… well, children. Teens are the primary consumer group for Logan Paul’s YouTube Vlogs, and what makes this important to marketers? This age group is very unlikely to be influenced by traditional marketing (television, print, etc.). Instead, they are influenced the most when they don’t even realize somebody is attempting to influence them. Strategically, the marketers are making their products “cool” to the teens and twenty-somethings of the world, but they are doing so without actually lowering themselves to the standards of the community.
By paying Paul, and other people of his ilk, companies can optimize their reach into the up-and-coming consumer groups. And despite the fact that they will inevitably end up offending half the world at some point (see: Logan Paul’s video where he displayed a suicide victim hanging from a tree in a Japanese forest), the message is out and the company is clear of any blowback. This model makes influencers important in a brand’s quest to reach the future-buyers-of-America, and worth the money required to target such markets.
By altering the perspective of the brand to fit the audience we can create a whole new consumer type. In this case, we allow the influencer’s perspective to reign simply because it is his or her perspective that captivated the target audience to begin with. If Paul thinks the product is worthy, there is a significant number of his followers who are going to be willing to at least give it a try. At that point, it is up to the product to sell itself.
As a 36 year husband and father of two, I don’t waste my time following influencers. My days of acting out and living at the spur of the moment are well behind me, and I find no solace in looking backward. And as a habitual researcher this type of marketing would not be effective on me. I’m not easily influenced beyond the research that I’ve performed myself. However, as a 36 year old head of a marketing team, I am intrigued by the reach that these people are able to achieve, and while their audience is well outside of my target demographic, their method of seemingly unfiltered access is at least a little bit intriguing.