Sell Me Something
Customers love to buy stuff, but they hate being sold on it. Nobody wants a salesman telling them how to spend their hard earned cash. Not only because consumers want the final say in their financial choices, but also because a shady salesman has a lot to gain from their influence. Most notably, money.
Oftentimes, a love-hate phenomenon teeters around the delicate relationship between buyers and sellers, which is built on mutual understanding, trust, and ultimately a fair trade. Medium journalist, Siya Success, says that the harmony between marketing, sales, and the consumer is incredibly fragile, claiming a direct approach feels like the salesman’s only concern is getting into your pockets. Random salesmen don’t care about your skin complexion, they don’t care what kind of car you drive, and they don’t care if you’re dressed right for a semi-formal 5th grade graduation ceremony.; They just want to close a sale so they can collect their commission. “All you see is making money, therefore it reeks desperation,” says Success.
It’s for this reason covert sales pitches feel like a secret betrayal. A salesman always has something to gain from their persuasions, so when a customer is sideswiped by a salesman disguised as a friend, a colleague, or their favorite social media personality, it’s hard to ignore the disappointingly sleazy underlying motive. No customer wants to become the numbskull cash cow to a moneygrubbing seller who will say anything to cash in.
Via u/DavidRolls
Originally, influencers were seen as a more wholesome version of the traditional cold-calling, door-to-door swindler. Under the guise of neighborly trustworthiness and the “I’m not a salesman” facade, influencer marketing soared around 2005. Sponsors paid bloggers to slip some good product reviews into their content, hoping the unintrusive positivity surrounding the brand would encourage more sales. Bloggers and content creators were paid per click, getting rewarded financially for higher viewership. Since then, the model has snowballed. Influencers, who were once regarded as friendlies to their followers, became the ultimate vessel for brand credibility and customer confidence.
The online disinhibition effect causes social media users to trust strangers online, particularly when they repeatedly begin to recognize the same, kind-faced content creators on their feed. “Repeated anonymity strips away fear of judgment, there are no real-life consequences and strangers don’t live in your world.” This emotional distance allows users to bond with public figures on social media without fear of rejection, oftentimes sharing their space through “GRWM” videos or other intimate settings. This forges a powerful one-sided parasocial relationship.
Influencers never bond with their followers in this way, seeing their followers as a faceless name on a screen or a numerical data point on the viewership tracking insights they send over to their sponsors. This relationship dissonance is ultimately what has made users feel deceived by their favorite influencers. Viewers thought these were real people in real bedrooms giving real opinions, trusting that their thoughts were genuine. However, with the increase in obviously undisclosed advertisements surging onto our feeds, audiences wised up, witnessing influencers turn into paid actors in real time.
Via u/YoungGoldman
“There was a time when your favorite YouTuber would say, ‘This is my holy grail,’ and you’d actually believe them.” Lael Hansen, a content creator and culture critic online, says she would rather trust her real friend’s product recommendations than take the word from a paid-ad influencer on social media ever again. “We’ve officially hit the downfall of influencer culture,” she says in a recent release. “From TikTok ‘relatable’ hauls to YouTubers pushing overpriced junk, it’s starting to feel like one giant commercial. Undisclosed ads, fake ‘authentic’ content, and constant selling have made people tune out.”
Via u/Dean Derobot
Influencer culture has completely lost its magic. As the uncleverly cloaked, disingenuous sales pitch seeps deeper into the roots of social media, the actual influence of influencers rots from the inside out.
Diary of a Used Car Salesman
With a social media feed on a constant loop of consumer ads, it seems like we’ve seen the same woman, preaching the same corporate-coded motto, and ranting about her latest “obsession” with an up-and-coming product. While it’s never the same influencer, it’s always the same ad, haunting your algorithm and clogging up your meme-scrolling sessions with product placement, covert ads, and undisclosed sponsorships. Influencer marketing has become a staple in most consumer company’s professional marketing plans, pushing their product through fake social media reviews, paid ads, and freebie merchandise.
Companies are just handing over samples of product and asking socialites to post videos raving about it in return. That’s not exactly a neutral opinion or an unbiased perspective. Influencers are unashamedly becoming the relentless salesmen we fear guarding the exit of the grocery store, cornering us in the mall, and convincing us to buy a clunky used car for more than market-value. Yet, they don’t even have the decency to be upfront about it.
No longer trustworthy, influencers have effectively traded their influence for a pair of Lululemon tights, this season’s new Stanley cup, and a severed parasocial friendship with their followers. Users don’t want a slew of advertisements on their social media feeds anymore. They go to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other social media platforms to enjoy authentic content created by real people, not paid actors held hostage by their sponsors.
On Black Friday, social media traffic was at an all time low. Instead of buying influencer-sponsored products online, perhaps consumers took to the streets, pillaging the front window displays of their local department stores mimicking the good old days of rampant consumerism where influencers played no part in our purchases.
