Skip to main content

Learning Influence

Explaining to my parents' generation what I do at work is challenging enough even though they are familiar with many components of it from their working years. Trying to explain what a Tik-Tok influencer does is a whole another level of impossibility. 

Before the pandemic, Herbes owned a vintage shop, but once Covid hit, she found herself in the position of many other small business owners and had to shut down her store. TikTok became her primary business. Because of the popularity of her blog, Herbes was able to monetize her TikTok through sponsored posts, which she works with brands to develop.

Sometimes, to mix it up and engage her followers, she’ll involve them in her design choices. When decorating a guest room, she asked viewers to vote on the color of the decorative pillows. (Teal won out over pink, and viewers also chose a salmon-colored paint for the walls.)

Lately these world have collided for me as I find myself researching how influencer marketing works on Tik-Tok for a client. I am not sure I actually understand what makes these folks popular and powerful enough to be the growth engine of a brand. My level of incomprehension is not much far from that of the elderly folks I can't explain modern technology to. The history of influencer marketing is helpful as it connects an old concept to new execution mediums.

Starting as early as the 18th century, marketers have leveraged the power of influential people. Josiah Wedgwood was a British potter whose cream-colored artwork got the approval of Queen Charlotte in the 1765 — even earning him the official title of “Her Majesty’s Potter.” Knowing that the Queen was the ultimate influencer at the time, Wedgwood leveraged his new status and promoted his pottery as “Queensware,” the world’s first luxury brand. The royal endorsement catalyzed his brand, as people started flocking to his business and clamoring for his work soon after.

And there is the whole murky side to this business with influence being peddled to young and impressionable targets - they are the ones that drive the numbers and virality. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more