It seems that ‘Influencers’ are chasing me everywhere.
I have been receiving messages from one who needs me to be rescued by using the product she flogs. Perhaps it will make me look younger, but I doubt it, and I certainly would not pony up the absurd amount of money to buy it from her special friend, at the special once off price, only available to her followers.
I am not a follower, nor am I a 24 year old female millennial, and I have been around way too long for the nonsense about scarcity to have any effect at all on me.
All I would like to know is who the hell sold her my mobile phone number, and why does she think I am interested?
There is nothing wrong with using a celebrity, someone with real influence, to provide a spokesperson for your product. It has been a valuable element in the marketing armoury since the advent of advertising.
However, it is dumb to use a celebrity in the absence of a creative idea, born of a strategy. A way of communicating the value your product can deliver to those who may buy and use it.
I am perhaps old and cranky, but the hugely increasing use of so called ‘influencers’ self styled gurus of nothing important, gives me the Tom Tits.
If you want to demonstrate the paucity of your strategic marketing chops, go pay some silly Instagram influencer a pile of money to post your rubbish on their site, so the bots can like it and they can charge you piles of money that could be put to better use.
It is lazy, lazy, and no substitute for doing the hard work of diagnosis of the problem or opportunity, followed by the development of an appropriate strategy. This necessitates hard work, making difficult choices, accepting risks, and implementing, learning, and going again.
Too often I see silly marketing people convincing themselves that an influencer campaign, whatever the hell that may be, is the solution to, well, whatever, which is normally all about being seen to be doing something.
Do the work instead.
Cartoon credit: Courtesy Tom Fishburne at marketoonist.com
