Congratulations… It’s an Influencer
In a time when strategy is being drowned out by selfies and marketing plans are being hijacked by personal branding agendas, the question looms: Is influencer culture the messiah modern marketing has been waiting for—or the beautifully filtered lie leading it astray?
The Birth of the “Insta-Baby” Marketer
Once upon a time, marketers were strategists—tacticians armed with insights, segmentation maps, consumer behaviour models, and budgets that required boardroom justification. Today, it seems all you need is a ring light, a hashtag, and a following.
Influencer marketing has, undeniably, achieved what traditional advertising sometimes failed to do: connect. It has humanised brands, created new revenue streams for creators, and turned everyday people into global voices. But in this high-speed evolution, we must ask: what have we left behind?
From Insight to Influence
Let’s be honest: we are watching the professionalisation of popularity.
Influencers are no longer simply influential—they are a full-blown industry, complete with media kits, rate cards, engagement calculators, and a reality-TV level obsession with lifestyle optics. A campaign that once started with a 20-page insight report now begins with “Who’s trending on TikTok this week?”
And here lies the danger: when influence replaces insight, marketing becomes reactive, not strategic. When marketers choose reach over relevance, fame over function, and aesthetics over authenticity, the result is often hollow brand messaging—pretty, popular, but painfully ineffective.
Accountability? That’s Not in the Bio
Influencer marketing is, for all its appeal, notoriously light on accountability. While impressions and engagement may look good on a PowerPoint slide, what happens when ROI needs to be measured in hard conversions or actual behaviour change?
Too many campaigns still treat influencers as magic beans: plant them, and the results will grow. But with audiences growing savvier and platforms constantly shifting their algorithms, the real winners are often the influencers themselves—not necessarily the brands.
Marketing’s Existential Crisis
Let’s call it what it is: a crisis of credibility.
Marketers are being edged out of their own industry, slowly replaced by individuals who may never have read Kotler, studied positioning theory, or even considered long-term brand equity. It’s not jealousy—it’s concern. Not every viral moment is strategic, and not every popular post builds a brand.
Influencer marketing, like any other tool, needs boundaries, strategy, and alignment to business objectives. It’s a tactic, not a religion.
So, What Now?
This isn’t a call to cancel influencers. They are here, and they are powerful. But it is a call to marketers—to return to the table. To reclaim insight. To rebuild the bridge between creativity and commerce.
Let influencers inspire—but don’t let them replace your marketing plan. Because while babies are cute, they still need adults in the room to raise them.
