Influencer Marketing and Sustainability by Carmen and Mercedes from the University of Zaragoza

This is a transcription of the podcast episode Academic: Influencer Marketing and Sustainability by Carmen and Mercedes from University of Zaragoza from AGILE Sustainability

Hello and Welcome to Agile Sustainability. Our episode today will focus on exploring how marketing can serve corporate sustainability. We all know that marketing is an important activity for businesses to build connections with customers. Therefore, it’s beneficial for businesses to learn to leverage this important activity during sustainability transitions. To help our listeners to explore the connections between marketing and sustainability, we have invited two speakers to share their expertise on this topic. Carmen and Mercedes from the University of Zaragoza are very generous to share their research on exploring how influencer and relationship marketing serve corporate sustainability.

What is Influencer Marketing and Relationship Marketing?

Regarding Influencer marketing, it focuses on leveraging individuals with influence over potential buyers and orienting marketing activities around these individuals to deliver a brand message to the wider market. This strategic marketing uses social networks in collaboration with opinion leaders, who act as a channel of communication.

Influencer marketing can be therefore highly effective. It works by creating a brand image and getting social media audiences involved while helping brands to enrich their offers by providing a more socially direct means to reach the target audience. The most common influencer marketing relies on social media such as Instagram (79%), Facebook (46%), and YouTube (32%).

Regarding Relationship marketing, it deals with the use of strategies and tactics for consumer segmentation and loyalty building. It aims to establish long-term interactive relationships between the company and its target audience.

Well, we speak about digital advertising. This kind of commercial communication is aimed at shifting the company’s goals from customer acquisition to customer retention, searching for their commitment. Further to loyalty, committed customers can be a very good communication resource for the company.

Influencer marketing furthers the goals of relationship marketing. Companies use Instagram macro and micro-influencers as leaders of opinion and as a means to advertise their products on social networks.

Hence, they are two marketing terms that can work together, searching for a common commercial objective. The rapid growth of digitization has increased consumer involvement and social media users and companies exploit this reality to conduct their online promotion. Social networks further the accomplishment of relationship marketing goals and configure online relationship marketing.

What are the relationships between marketing, influencer marketing, and corporate sustainability?

Marketing is a knowledge area belonging to the business and social sciences. It is an activity addressed for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that value customers, clients, partners and society at large. It deals with business decisions, and it means that marketing is committed to economic returns and the social environment.

Sustainability can be seen as the awareness, the way of living or thinking, or the mental models that govern our actions and influence our behaviour. Corporate sustainability applies to both financial and non-financial activities:

• Financial activities have to do with economic sustainability based on economic prosperity and development.
• Nonfinancial activities lead to the achievement of environmental, social, and governance sustainability that will protect the interests of shareholders and other stakeholders. In this context, leadership sustainability, that is, the process of leading others towards a common vision is concerned with managing the organization’s resources, taking into account not only the leader’s actions but also how they influence others.

What are the challenges to serving corporate sustainability via marketing?

First of all, business decisions must accomplish an appropriate combination of economic and social returns objectives. Business organizations worldwide should use the resources at their disposal to serve both economic and social goals. This is an important challenge. We are not speaking about social marketing but that all marketing decisions must support the needs of society: Every marketing decision has to be taken according to these terms.

In the current digital business context, business organizations should be expected to make use of the technological advancements at their disposal to promote the concept of profit-with-purpose, by generating returns on investment for shareholders along with positive social and environmental gains.

Focusing on Influencer marketing, the challenge is getting the effectiveness of influencer marketing campaigns in terms of complete corporate sustainability: financial and non-financial, and not being intrusive.

In 2017, 70.7% of US businesses used Instagram. However, although over 120 million users interacted with a brand, 70% of posts remained unseen. This might indicate a degree of saturation and a need for more distinct differentiation: shortcomings that should be considered in influencer selection processes. Businesses need to be accurate in their selection of opinion leaders, both micro and macro. This is important because it affects both the associated costs and the potential of the candidates, while possibly compromising the sustainable company image.

What marketing considerations there are for the pursuit of corporate sustainability?

On one hand, marketing has to provide returns on investments. Every investment in marketing strategies and tactics has to be able to reach profitability. It means to take business (not just commercial) decisions according to the financial disposal of the business and following a commercial plan, where the customer is the core. This is the first consideration to pursuit financial sustainability, mandatory to the survival of the business in the market.

Further, every investment, every marketing action has to be also driven by a mission, a vision and objectives that reflect the commitment of the business to society and the environment. Market-based financial measures complement accounting measures by providing deeper insights into corporate performance and incorporating future performance expectations. But, the entire business organization has to be involved and be aware of the significance of the individual, the people, the society, and the environment to pursuit non-financial sustainability.

Speaking about the use of influencers in commercial communication, one way for companies to balance both sides of sustainability could be through the careful selection of influencers, based on their achievements in terms of user engagement.

But it is more important to achieve a high level of consumer engagement, in response to a marketing stimulus, which is a reflection of the effectiveness of the company’s marketing strategies. The stimulus is the important thing now; there is to know the select type of influencer and message content without separate financial and non-financial sustainability, which should work together.

Which are the influencer traits suitable to serve corporate sustainability?

It means to identify the added value by the influencers as an essential resource to achieve customer engagement, that is, the various customer actions that influence business performance. Technological advances have facilitated customer engagement. Nevertheless, they also encourage opportunism information and even spread fake news. Social networks, for instance, serve to interact among people, who are very desirable in social terms, and also to inform and to establish direct communication between business and current and potential customers. Nevertheless, net surfers criticize social media advertising as a growing nuisance, for example. When the business is the transmitter, it has to be aware of its responsibilities.

This interaction must be managed and it has to be controlled to be respectful, ethical and useful to transmit the adequate ways to preserve the desirable sustainability.

The three most important traits of an influencer, which are renowned in the specialized literature: credibility, pleasantness and emotions can determine the customer’s engagement with the promoted brand or product. They are seen as promotional tools with the ability to set a trend and to influence their followers in consumption decision-making.

On one hand, there are two great kinds of influencers: macro and micro, depending on their number of followers. Macro influencers have a wider scope, a larger audience, and a more professional profile; they also take up less selection and management time and carry less risk of fake followers. However, they involve higher costs, may generate distrust and can be perceived as unnatural.

The company needs to assess the personal skills of candidate influencers for transmitting emotions, evaluate its brand representation costs, and define the target audience for the advertisement, always under the premise of ensuring corporate sustainability.

On the other hand, micro-influencers are opinion leaders with fewer followers (between 1.000 and 100.000); therefore, their services are cheaper. Micro-influencers on Instagram are considered to achieve a more desirable form of engagement than macro-influencers because they offer the advantage of adapting brand effort to more specific and committed audiences, reaching new audience niches and obtaining high conversion rates. They are more natural and tend to consider their followers as friends.

Macro influencers are perceived as more accessible and socially desirable and thus more likely to generate consumer sympathy toward a brand and boost its popularity. However, while a greater number of followers may give the message greater reach, it may still be not enough.

Indeed, micro-influencers are more effective than macro-influencers at generating positive consumer attitudes and behaviours.

The credibility of the information source, meanwhile, depends on how trustworthy it appears to the receiver. As the credibility of the source increases, consumers become more likely to be persuaded by the message. The message content should increase the perceived added value by the receivers, but influencers are mere transmitters of the message, each with an individual presentation style. Thus, to increase the impact of the message and achieve consumer commitment, the image conveyed by the influencer must match the image of the brand.

If customers are loyal and delighted, that is, if their engagement with a seller encompasses both calculative and affective components, then customer and seller have established a lasting relational exchange based on strong emotional ties.

Macro influencers do not target specific audiences, and may even generate distrust, and possibly, therefore, have less influence on commitment than that achieved by micro-influencers.

Selling values, more than products, is the base of a business marketing orientation. This marketing paradigm is nowadays more important if possible than before, but it is since Marketing was acknowledged as a scientific discipline. As well, the news is that it is the new advertising trend. New confidence and commitment degrees define currently the relationship between brand-customer.

In this sense:

• Storytelling techniques are very important to achieve customer engagement in the current days.
• The origin of the innovations must be the information collected about the needs and concerns of the people, not the technical staff of the business.
• According to a Meaningful Brands (Havas-Group) recent report, 80% of brands are not perceived by consumers as having positive impacts on our welfare and life quality. This is a very useful finding. Brands have to know differentiate and achieve an appropriate position in the market with arrangement with nonfinancial corporate sustainability and preserving at the same time the financial one.

In any case, the transmission of emotions proves to be a common and positive determinant of engagement in both scenarios. Therefore, when selecting influencers, companies should be able to compare their capacity for transmitting emotions. They also need to consider brand sponsorship costs and the target audience for the advertisement, all under the premise of preserving corporate sustainability. In this sense, enthusiasm, admiration, inspiration, entertainment, tranquillity, information credibility, authenticity and happiness act as component variables of emotions.

What about marketing strategies for corporate sustainability?

Marketing strategies are two: acquisition and retention. Afterwards, every extension of marketing, like influencer marketing, serves to achieve goals linked to attracting and retaining customers. Anyway, each one has its strategies, depending on the main objective. Influencer marketing for instance pretends to engage the customers using opinion leaders as prescribers.

Focusing on the present subject, marketing and advertising are crucial to the relationships between brand-customer, currently involved in a process of change, which is mainly motivated by the technologies and the changes of the environment.

In the end, brands have to seduce through communicating their business values, using that appropriate communication media, and using different techniques, like storytelling. These stories must be based on stories of sustainable nature. All the businesses have to be based on sustainability principles and these principles have to know to be transmitted to the people.

A company needs to arouse the emotions that generate commitment if it is to gain a sustainable competitive advantage in building relationships with customers. Thus, business objectives extend beyond customer retention to customer relations based on engagement. Better customer relations make it easier to balance financial and nonfinancial corporate sustainability goals.

To summarize, influencer marketing can be said to serve relationship marketing. Through Instagram, the selection of macro and micro-influencers is open to three communication strategies: one generic and less differentiated, another addressed and more differentiated, and a third combining the first two.

Communication goals — particularly customer engagement-, the available budget, the characteristics of the product, and the profile of the target market are the main factors to bear in mind when deciding the most effective corporate sustainability strategy.

The generic strategy focuses on the selection of macro-influencers when the company’s key objective is to acquire new customers — it can be described as transactional influencer marketing, with the less differentiated message content. In this case, the decision will be based on the objective of transmitting emotions, and thus the decision-maker will focus mainly on the macro influencer’s potential performance and the admiration indicator.

The second (addressed and differentiated) strategy concerns the selection of micro-influencers to convey the message to a more select and demanding market niche and therefore requires market segmentation techniques. This strategy is more focused on chasing customer retention, even when introducing a new product. And, it can be targeted at current brand customers. Working with Nano influencers can be beneficial for brands that are trying to attract everyday people.

A combined strategy bears higher costs and is more ambitious because it aims to draw on both types of influencers. Its advantages are linked to a higher probability of accessing new customers and of retaining current ones. Its disadvantages include relatively higher resource costs and a greater risk of confusion if acquisition and retention goals are not handled properly. Offer characteristics can be an essential determinant of the effectiveness of the message. If the offer is very exclusive, the combined strategy could be the best option.