The internet fractured one giant audience into thousands of tight-knit communities, and the brands paying attention are following the trust, not the follower count.
Having run performance-based influencer marketing campaigns across more than 2,000 brand partnerships, Tallinn-based Odience has started to notice some patterns. One of them, harder to ignore than the rest, is that creators driving the strongest results are rarely the biggest ones. What drives results doesn’t seem to be size, but trust.
Influencers have begun to build tight-knit communities obsessed by very specific things. And from a sales perspective, they’re more than exceeding expectations. It’s a shift that has been building for years.
For decades, marketing ran on one idea. Reach as many people as possible and some of them will buy. More eyes on the product meant more potential customers. Brands therefore chased scale like never before; through TV spots, billboards, and celebrity campaigns built to be seen by as many people as physically possible.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!That methodology is getting stale. Overexposure has left people feeling either numb or sceptical. Trust in big brands wore thin, because a product built for everyone ends up standing for no one.
