No Buy April: Month in Review
The disconnect between what influencers do, and what people think they do
I ran into a neighbor recently who told me she had listened to an interview I’d done about walking away from influencing. She couldn’t remember who it was with (and I couldn’t figure it out either), but she shared that she didn’t fully understand how influencing worked, and found it interesting to hear a former influencer talk about the constant pressure to sell stuff as a part of the job. I keep thinking about it, because I find there’s often still a disconnect between what influencers do, and what people think they do.
Despite the fact that an influencer’s primary job is to sell things (and main source of income is through selling things), sometimes the pervasive nature of it makes that fact less obvious to the audience.
recently wrote about “how easy it is to believe we are above being influenced, and how much marketing depends on that belief to work.”The most effective marketing does not look like marketing at all. It feels like a tip from your cooler friend. A discovery you made yourself.
That really is the crux of influencer marketing, and why it’s a $250 billion industry. Even though I know exactly how the industry works and changed my entire career and life path to extricate myself from it, I still get sucked in from time to time.
But whenever I start trying to “fix” things with consumerism, I typically realize fairly quickly that it’s the marketing I’m attracted to, not the actual product. The “vibes” or “aesthetic” are what pulls me in, but more times than not, the thing doesn’t deliver whatever the marketing told me it would. Usually I can find that dopamine I’m chasing with people and places that don’t involve my credit card or a UPS truck. Happiness and fulfillment can be found for free, but capitalism doesn’t want you to know that.
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