Should kids be a part of an Influencer Marketing Strategy?
PERSONAL BRAND & ONLINE REPUTATION
Present-day society is fully dependent on screens, and digital intoxication becomes crippling. Such is the influence of digital means that companies compete for attention. At present, people know what happens at any time and, consequently, society in general demands authenticity and credibility, social and ethical commitment, and transparency from companies. Besides, there is a crisis of representativeness full of clichés (i.e., all politicians are corrupt, all companies are swindlers or all banks banksters).
What is the key to be heard and not overlooked?
It’s not about being cool or doing whatever it takes to sell more but a trust relationship built over time. Trust is a long-term bet that as with reputation both can be lost within minutes. However, depending on the quality of this reputation, mistakes fade away.
It is not a secret that trust is gained through social commitment and being accountable to build closer relationships. Companies should not build them as a cosmetic exercise. They well know that once trust is granted, truthfulness and the right to be heard come together.
How to gain trust?
Because of the vast amount of information, more and more companies opt to work on emotional intelligence. By making the most of the circumstances, they try to humanize themselves, plopping their lucrative suits to connect with their target market and create long-term person-to-person relationships.
The best campaign to attract the most attention is the simple one that uses the emotions of society. The most powerful tool is to tell stories, inasmuch as society connects quickly with them.
Influencers, the trust generators.
Brands have flocked to influencers, people – famous or not – with a lot of followers on social media, for years, in the hope that their online popularity will entice their fans to buy the products they endorse.
The key to influencer sponsorship success? Likability and relatability, and get both is a must-do for a proper engagement campaign. But influencer marketing is nothing new, the coming of social media marketing in the 2010s gave rise to influencers of all shapes and sizes.
Kid influencers, from cradle to sponsor.
Today, kid influencers represent a powerful marketing impact for many big-name brands. They engage adults and other kids when marketing products or services, becoming trendsetters as powerful as any adult influencer. Today, kid influencers represent a powerful marketing impact for many big-name brands. They engage adults and other kids when marketing products or services, becoming trendsetters as powerful as any adult influencer.
As a result, kids too young to create their own accounts on the platforms are becoming trendsetters, which means a lot of money for the families of kid influencers.
Kid influencers generate large amounts of money for themselves and their families, but at what price?
A growing number of kid influencers (and their proud parents) are struggling to make a profit, parents who decide to monetize their child. And this fact has raised reasonable ethical concerns.
People do not like it when children are used for profit. Moreover, the more time they are on the media landscape, the more credibility they lose. These kids end up being puppets that only reproduce commercial speeches over time.
These parents risk their children’s personal brand. In the long term, these children will be marked by their digital fingerprints and affected by the broken toy syndrome, when companies no longer pay attention to them and the entire commercial bubble in which they were submerged burst. They are consigned to oblivion, to a different world in which they were completely alien. All of them lose their childhood, and over the years, many are subjected to addictions or fall into depression.
Furthermore, the constant feedback loop on social media is severely damaging to the brains of adults who get addicted to dopamine hits, slowly tearing away at their tolerance for hate and criticism. So, what this loop does to a young, developing child who grew up knowing the Internet as the only reality, with comments, shares, and brand deals inherently tied to their self-worth.
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