There was a time when Marketing was understood with respect to the marketing Mix. The 4P’s of a good Marketing Mix included – Product, Price, Place & Promotion. Barring the first three, the fourth aspect became a major determiner of the word marketing in the 21st Century. Today, the Promotional aspect of Marketing is nothing less than the importance of the product itself. And with the promotions, came the question of how the audience wants to receive communication. As the market demand shifted, influencers came into the promotional sphere of marketing.

Products, in order to be accepted, had to fit into the mould of the customer’s daily life. For this to be realistically displayed, the influencers became a medium. Influencer marketing industry soon took a leap of faith & reached its zenith by leaps & bounds. Every other person on the internet became an influencer.

However, soon the rampant fraudulent reports of false profiles & inorganic followers became the talk of the industry. While the influencers began their journey as “People’s People”, they ended with a tag of being “Inorganic People.”, due to the lack of trust element it made their industry over-saturated.

Then came into the scene the micro-influencers, the ones with a smaller following, than just 6 zero numbers & they sustained. They turned out to be organic influencers, having genuine followers of their respective brands. With this major shift in the influencer industry, the brands focused on the authenticity factor. When the novel coronavirus turned into a pandemic, several influencers came to surface showing their followers how they were managing their life at home. Various brands made greater use of digital platforms to continue their product recall through them. Now the good cop & bad cop influencer both urged towards genuine content creation.

The future of Influencer Marketing is at odds with brands today until the world reopens with arms wide open; however, brands now view collaborations in different ways. There is an implied unpredictability during these times regarding the availability of influencers, so the market came up with CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) of influencers.  Those who make a living through the virtual world are the new influencers of today, these include Programmers, designers who are working out these time to manufacture CGI influencers. They replicate scenes from an Influencer’s life & provide a ready solution to the brands. The social media influencers, in turn, are using their CGI’s to continue their marketing collaboration. This has also allowed brands to have complete autonomy over the products they are advertising through CGI’s, where an avatar of the influencer works better for them. The future of influencer marketing will eventually be less of human, more of bots.