Spritz Society successfully used influencer collaborations for rapid growth. However, this strategy caused them to lose focus on their core brand proposition, becoming known as an "influencer collab brand." This highlights the risk that over-reliance on partnerships can prevent a company from defining and marketing its own hero product effectively.
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An influencer's audience provides an initial sales boost but is a finite resource that can be quickly saturated. The long-term viability of a personality-led brand depends on its ability to acquire net-new customers through traditional channels, who are not part of the original fanbase.
Contrary to the belief they worked with thousands of influencers, Gymshark's early strategy focused on a small, "handcrafted" group of the most revered athletes in fitness. This "depth over width" approach built credibility by associating the brand with top-tier talent rather than using a broad, spray-and-pray method.
Don't treat partnerships as a magical fix. They are a scaling mechanism. If your core sales process, messaging, or product-market fit is weak, a partner channel will only magnify those problems across a wider audience, just as it would with your successes.
Accel Events thrived by pivoting to a virtual events platform during COVID. However, this new reputation hurt them when the market returned to in-person events. They were no longer seen as a viable in-person solution, forcing another costly product and brand rebuild to recapture their original market.
Forcing brand messaging on an influencer leads to inauthentic content that fails to resonate. A better approach is to educate them on your product and collaborate on an angle that aligns with their established voice and topics. Authenticity drives distribution and engagement, making the partnership more effective than a boilerplate promotion.
Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and creators are shifting from being brand partners to direct competitors. They leverage their audiences to launch their own products (e.g., Prime vs. Gatorade), posing a significant strategic threat to established CPG brands by bypassing traditional retail and marketing.
A common mistake is running short-term influencer "pilots" with a transactional mindset (money for posts). In B2B, you are buying long-term trust, not immediate reach. This requires building genuine relationships and ensuring influencers actually use and believe in your product, advocating for it organically.
Large brands are falling into the trap of "small brand envy," trying to replicate the playbooks of agile D2C startups. This is a flawed strategy, as the tactics required to maintain market leadership are fundamentally different from those used for initial growth.
LoveSack operated successfully for years based on product instinct alone. However, transformational growth occurred only after the company intentionally defined its core brand philosophy—'Designed for Life'—and then amplified that clear message with advertising. This shows that a well-defined brand story is a powerful, distinct growth lever, separate from initial product-market fit.
While influencers offer access to underpriced attention, over-reliance creates a dangerous dependency. Businesses must prioritize building their own content creation capabilities to maintain leverage and control over their brand's destiny, ensuring they are never at the mercy of a third party.