Facebook bets on stars in quest for sales

FE Team | Published: May 06, 2019 02:06:28

Stars with legions of followers on Instagram will soon be able to sell products directly to users using the company's apps, reports BBC.
Facebook, which owns Instagram and Whatsapp, said this week that the future of shopping would depend on content "creators".
Hiring so-called influencers to shift goods is nothing new. Royal warrants have been sought after for centuries.
They used to be a way to know a product was probably safe and reliable long before consumer protection laws were common. If you got one, your product was literally fit for a king.
But there are now signs that people are growing weary of being told that a product is nice by someone whose only qualification is being famous.
"The best ads are making culture of their own," says Grant McCracken, an anthropologist who has advised companies including Netflix and Ford on culture and commerce.
The worst can attract derision, he says.
Author Malcolm Gladwell introduced the world to the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something in his 2008 book, Outliers. So if you apply that to culture, we are still very young by the time we have watched 10,000 hours of television, Dr McCracken says.
We become cultural experts very fast.
And being surrounded by smart voices on social media means lazy marketing is more likely to be jumped upon and ridiculed by smarter consumers.
"They are smarter through TV but they are smarter still because they can confer," says Dr McCracken. "You never watch alone. You are watching in a crowd, so you are enabled by the smartest person in the room."
The key for influencers is to offer something more than a bare endorsement, he says. The promoter, product, and customer must all be better off, which is a tall order.
So how does that work in practice? Dr McCracken points to a campaign by software maker Adobe, which hired director and actor Zach Braff to make a short film based on a competition winner's idea.