As you may remember from a previous post, last November Condé Nast Italia launched its first Social Academy to train influencers. The first course was based on influencers hoping to work in the Beauty market, while in May a new course started, this time revolving around Lifestyle (so they probably taught students how to produce more pictures of hotels, swimming pools, restaurants and dreaded overhead food photos, plus people bicycling in exotic locations or doing extreme sports – yawn).
Around the same time Condé Nast Italia launched its Social Academy, fashion commentator, publisher, educator and trend forecaster Li Edelkoort released her S/S 19 trend report, highlighting that influencers will more or less disappear in two years' time.
A recent research may prove that Edelkoort is probably right: two weeks ago global digital marketing consultancy Bazaarvoice issued indeed a press release with the results of a survey (carried out between June and July 2018) that involved 4,000 consumers from across Europe (2,000 consumers interviewed in the UK; 2,000 in the French and German markets). The survey showed that consumers are fatigued by the repetitive nature of content (47%) and by the dipping quality (23%) of influencer created contents.
Besides 55% of the people interviewed feel that the contents are too materialistic, while 54% state that they misrepresent real life. In Germany 32% of respondents even highlighted that influencers do not promote ethical behaviour.
Age seems to be an "influence on the influencer": 40% of millennials class the role of a social media influencer as a full-time job; consumers over the age of 35 don't seem to agree (24%; it is not that older people can't see the opportunity of social media, it's just that they have lived longer and know that this gig is not going to last...).
There are more interesting results when it comes to actual sales: 92% of European consumers interact with influencers, but around half of these (43%) have yet to make a purchase based on such a recommendation.
There are actually controversial details also showing that consumers (49% from the UK; 68% from France) follow more influencers than they used to but expect new content on a daily basis from them, something that puts pressure on production to remain authentic and high quality. It is undeniable that content suffers when you have to create more and more images to keep your followers entertained (not to mention the importance of numbers that allow you to get more visibility and more contracts from brands, meaning that some influencers have also turned to the practice of purchasing fake followers).
It is undeniable that influencers and brands play on very basic psychological tricks including the repeated exposure to something (think about Vêtements' knitted sock-trainers - when they came out they didn't look so beautiful, but now, available in their original configuration, reinterpreted by other brands or simply in their counterfeit version, they look acceptable to the human eye and extremely desirable), instilling in the viewer positive and familiar feelings. In a nutshell, you see a bag or a pair of shoes on someone (a celebrity, an influencer and then a friend) and you start craving for them, in the meantime the accessories become fashionable, trendy, familiar, recognisable and desirable, so you must simply HAVE it.
In pre-social media times, a trend started when somebody around us (think about school friends) started wearing something like a pair of shoes by a particular brand and everybody jumped on the same bandwagon, but now it feels as if somebody was imposing a specific trend globally on all consumers, from Asia to the States, passing through Europe.
Instagram posts looked rather intriguing at the very beginning, but soon things went out of control with sponsored adverts and content: at the very beginning people following specific fashion influencers would see in their feeds the above-mentioned influencers in the most extraordinary outfits, in exotic places or at runway shows. Things started in an original way, but now they have become rather contrived, especially when the same fashion house gave the same item to a series of influencers who then proceeded to saturate the market with images of that same item accompanied by the same hashtag (see the "Dior Saddle Bag-Gate").
As highlighted in previous posts, in some cases influencers forgot to flag the content as sponsored or as an advert for a specific fashion brand; in others they showed they didn't know the rules and regulations regarding certain issues.
A few months ago for example the Blonde Salad's Chiara Ferragni fell in a terrible trap when she ranted (on her Instagram account) about a brand of powder milk she uses for her baby, proving she didn't know much about law and advertising since it is illegal since 2009 to advertise baby products such as artificial milk in Italy (the post was promptly removed, even though the influencer was probably aiming it at her audience in the US, where it is not illegal to advertise such products).
But the situation is quite often complicated: a while back Louis Vuitton launched its #MakeAPromise campaign in support of UNICEF initiatives in Syria. The brand launched a necklace and a bracelet with a silver Lockit and recently came up with the bracelet in five new colours (the brand vows to donate USD$100 to UNICEF with every purchase of the Silver Lockit Colour bracelet). On Instagram the #MakeAPromise initiative produces quite a few images, some of them "curated" by influencers that make you wonder if they are spontaneous pics or orchestrated ones (each bracelet is $250, and there are at least 4 or 5 in the pics posted by a few prominent influencers around the globe which makes you suspect they are actually orchestrated images) .
Sure, as stated in a previous post, influencers must pay bills too, but it looks like they may have more bills than ordinary people or they are accepting all sorts of sponsoring gigs to get more visibility.
This means that the believability of influencers is into question and the next step will be working towards improving the quality and authenticity of the content they produce or imposing stricter rules for both brands and influencers (a better adeherence to guidelines established by dedicated organisations including the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. or the Advertising Standards Authority and the Competition and Markets Authority in the United Kingdom, would be a start).
Yet, given the fact that we all seem to trust customer product reviews over the opinion of well-known influencers (after all, when booking a room somewhere we often read customer reviews, we don't go and check if this or that influencer has been there; mind you, there are services that offer hotels and B&Bs the possibilities to purchase positive reviews in the same way you can buy followers, so you should always try and be careful even with reviews ...), so, who knows, maybe in future brands may start considering the possibility of using real, more anonymous and reliable yet less prominent people as influencers. As usual, time will tell, but, if things do not change, Li Edelkoort may end up being right. In brief, give the hype another two years, before some influencers will have to find a real job.
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