Influencers can make or break your brand’s message. Hiring the right marketing partner is paramount to success.
April 29, 2024 | by Mitch Duckler — Founder and Managing Partner, FullSurge
As marketers wrangle for consumers’ attention amid an explosion of clutter on every channel, it’s no wonder Influencers have become such important commercial facilitators. In a crowded room, in short, all eyes turn to the celebrity. Trading on their power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of their authority, knowledge or devotion of audiences, Influencers are turning their enthusiastic followers into essential cogs in brand marketing machinery. The research organization Astute Analytica predicts that dollars spent on the global Influencer industry (fair to call it that) will grow from $10.5 billion in 2022 to an eye-popping $118 billion by 2031. To buttress what otherwise sounds like a “pie in the sky” projection, the analysts add that “89 percent of marketers say that ROI from Influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels.”
Control is something most marketers have a hard timing relinquishing, but doing so is absolutely vital to the success of Influencer relationships and campaigns. Among B2B marketers especially, there can be some confusion between the words “influencer” and “shill.” Often, contracts will state something like, “You will speak at x events, about which you’ll blog y times and tweet these pre-crafted tweets z times.” In these instances, the marketers may think they are properly managing the Influencer relationship, but more often they are handicapping the Influencer and jeopardizing the outcome of the campaign. Good Influencers want to have creative input and a measure of control over how their content is developed and distributed because, in their view and correctly, they usually know what will best resonate with their audience to drive the results the brand seeks. Zeroing in on the young adult demographic through Influencers took an ironic twist for McDonald’s recently — since the campaign featured an adult offering. “Last year we launched the Cactus Plant Flea Market box and had the highest weekly digital transactions to date in the U.S.,” said Tariq Hassan, McDonald’s U.S. chief marketing and customer experience officer. It came as a result of an insight from a tweet in November 2020, at the height of the pandemic. McDonald’s Twitter (now X) account admin posted: “One day you wake up and you don’t even realize you had your last Happy Meal.” And that tweet blew up. Fans jumped into the thread. “How are you doing McDonald’s?” asked one user, concerned that all was OK. “I’m in my feels today clearly,” the brand replied. “How are u?” “You good?” asked another. “Ignoring that I’m having an existential crisis, yes,” the brand replied. “Why did you have to do this now?” one user asked. “I was not planning to cry today but thank you,” said another. Another said she was OK knowing she’d ordered her last Happy Meal but was upset by the realization that someday her child would order his last one. And on it went. “So, we clearly struck a chord about the loss of childhood joy,” Hassan continues, “and we wondered how to recapture the quintessential childhood experience that was a Happy Meal. Could we do it by recreating an adult version of it? And this led us to the Artist space. When we work with Influencers or in this case Artists, we work really hard to ensure they have an existing relationship with the brand before a commercial one. We ensure that they have their own experience to bring to it.
“So, when we discovered Cactus Plant Flea Market, an artist-owned brand and creative outlet, we told them about the joy we were trying to recapture. And Cactus poured out a flood of memories of McDonald’s and how they always went there with childhood friends. Now an adult, the Cactus Plant Flea Market brand’s signature icon is a little yellow character called ‘Cactus Buddy!’ Cactus said, ‘We want Cactus Buddy! to have friends. Let’s bring McDonald’s characters back alongside Cactus Buddy! and make them a friend group.’ Cactus created all the merchandise, and visuals based on McDonald’s beloved characters and iconography. I have no doubt that this campaign experience would’ve been successful. But when you overlay it with cultural relevance via Artists like Cactus Plant Flea Market, you allow yourself to lean in, and trust to take place”; then you have something magical, and in this case, tremendously successful for the business. With Influencers, Hassan sums up, “It comes down to whether you are prepared to share the pen, to literally hand it over.”
Mitch Duckler, founder of FullSurge, a Chicago-based brand consultancy, brings 30+ years of brand management expertise from Unilever, Coca-Cola, and Prophet. His client roster includes Fortune 500 giants like ExxonMobil, Deloitte, and Hyatt. A TEDx speaker, Mitch is also a faculty member at ANA, chaired AMA conferences, and authored “The Indispensable Brand.” Stay tuned for his upcoming book, “The Future-Ready Brand,” out May 2024.
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