In 1945, Paul Lazarsfeld conducted The Decatur Study, a landmark in revealing how media influenced the decision-making of women in Decatur, Illinois.
His research dispelled the myth that people were entirely influenced by broadcast media.
In reality, a mix of media influence and personal relationships shaped an individual’s decisions.
After further research, Lazarsfeld and Katz published Personal Influence in 1955. Certain people in a social group, whom they called informal “opinion leaders,” consumed media and then shared their interpretation of that information with friends and neighbours, influencing the opinions of those around them.
Lazarsfeld and Katz also called these people “influentials.” They could sway how people voted, what they wore, and which detergent they bought.
This was essentially the first recognition of what we knew as the influencer in the 2010s, which became the creator in the 2020s when the term influencer began to carry negative associations. For the purpose of this article, let’s stick with influencer.
Today, an influencer's digital “social circle” has no limits, which is why a brand like Unilever invests half its digital media budget (around $3 billion) in social media and works with 300,000 influencers, up from 10,000 two years ago. Influencers, as a filter, have more sway than direct broadcast media in buying decisions amongst their social circle, or followers.
What was presumably a pastime in the 50s is now a business model, and though it started in B2C, it’s now firmly established in B2B, too.
Emily Hund describes that model beautifully in The Influencer Industry:
The influencer industrial ethos: the idea that anyone can cultivate a loyal audience by providing consistent and relatable content on social media, and then use that audience’s likes, follows, and other engagement metrics as evidence of “influence” to be leveraged for a range of social and economic rewards—many of them accessible through partnering with commercial brands to entwine their messages with one’s own.
The influencer’s personal image, opinion, and projected personality are the product, “sold” to followers, who in turn are “sold” to sponsors.
In B2B, provided the followers share a desired unifying demographic (e.g. they’re all marketers), the higher the count, the more the influencer is worth to brands, sponsors, and event organisers. They leverage influence, which scales.
It’s a great business model, but it’s different from what I define as an authority model.
An influencer leverages their profile to sell Adobe Express to thousands of marketers.
An authority leverages their profile to sell a strategic engagement to Adobe.
Sometimes the two profiles overlap, but that overlap is rarely optimal.
An influencer needs to be relatable. They need to show an “authentic” version of themselves (hence the selfies and pictures with blurred family members). They give recognisable examples to support broadly applicable observations at a Goldilocks difficulty level, maximising the total addressable audience.
Be intentional about which model you’re building.
P.S. To complicate matters, there are also celebrities, media businesses, and public intellectuals, but that's a conversation for another day.