The most impactful trend in marketing today is the collapse of consumer trust.

Brand loyalty is at an all-time low. Distrust in every institution – the media, corporations, government – is at an all-time high. Why? In large part algorithms self-organize media around consumers’ shared wants and likes, elevating community and devaluing authority.

The effect is that consumers today make purchase decisions through their communities. As Americans contemplate Mounjaro versus Wegovy, TikTok and WhatsApp are the front-lines. Welcome to the era of Real People Marketing.

Real People Marketing is the evolution of Influencer Marketing.

Brands embrace influencers and celebrities to co-opt the passion and permission from their followers. Yet, influencers are brands themselves. They are not real members of the community. So, they don’t convey trust for the same reasons brands struggle, because they are not actually like their followers.

Influencers are aspirational versus real.

Popular versus persuasive.

Exceptional versus intimate.

Awareness versus consideration.

Tellingly, influencer content outperforms brand content; however, lo-fi peer-to-peer content outperforms them both. In a recent Meta study, the highest converting ads on the platforms are lo-fi peer-to-peer. Brand and influencer content are both more expensive and less effective than peer-to-peer content. Consumers can actually feel real when making decisions.

Everyone’s an influencer.

“Man is by nature a social animal,” said Aristotle. Naturally, consumers are most influenced by like-minded people in their networks. Persuasion flows from shared geographies, affinities, ethnicities, sexual orientation, gender identity, professions and affiliations. These communities are identifiable and targetable through tools such as People First, Applekart and Untu.

Consumers are an amalgam of identities. By matching the right messenger to prospects based on intersecting identities with greater precision, marketers can rapidly build meaningful relationships and results at scale. This ‘micro’ content is 5x more likely to be organically shared and 3x more likely to be engaged than brand content with the same message.

Real People Marketing is the science of sourcing media from real people with shared lived experiences en masse in unison. Practically, it is how marketers drive results by organizing like-minded consumers. Unlike influencer marketing, it offers precision, performance, and scale through data and technology.

Approximately 30-50m people in the world are registered influencers, although there is most likely a lot of redundancy in platforms. The majority of people don’t think of themselves as influencers. When non-influencer influencers speak up about brands and issues, the message stands out, because it is scarce and real. Real people sharing real experiences is the best marketing, and the smaller the follower count, the more influential the individual is with their followers.

Real People Marketing was developed originally to counter extremism online. Perversely, ISIS and White Supremacists understand how media metastasizes online through relationships and identities online, because they cannot advertise through traditional marketing channels. So, in response, we learned to build bespoke human networks rapidly, authentically, and effectively to counter their propaganda, which provided a blueprint for both corporations and institutions alike.

Real People Marketing succeeds by tapping into the longtail of influence.

Instead of 5.07 million influencers in a database, Real People Marketing enables brands to source media from a population of 5.07 billion Internet users. Every consumer is now also a potential partner. 87% of People First campaigns enlist people that have never worked for a brand before.

So, when i-Health set out to drive purchase for its number one probiotic, Culturelle, the wellness brand commissions and then propagates hundreds of approved brand stories from actual Irritable Bowel Syndrome patients. When Floor & Decor wants to boost sales, the retailer recruits beyond the usual suspects of to-die-for kitchens and en-suite bathrooms to activate contractors and installers. Consideration is only a scroll away after all.

Conversely, brands are still trying to embrace realism through studio produced ads. Amazon’s “smiling factory worker” ad campaign mimics this reality by borrowing the social currency of their employees at work. Chipotle’s employee-voiced ads explain that “real food meets real impact.” Real People Marketing provides the bottom-up versioning to top-down advertising.

Real People Marketing develops real estate by being audience- and channel-agnostic

Consumers are more diverse today. They no longer fit into pre-set personas. They are always a scroll away from purchase. Consequently, brands must market in more places with more voices and more frequency. Real People Marketing solves this challenge by partnering directly with diverse creators and messengers across ANY digital platform: social, text,  email, web.

Why not meet consumers through transparent recommendations, reviews, posts, videos, comments, memes, animations, and ads on Yelp and Amazon, Pinterest and Nextdoor, and WhatsApp and Sina Weibo? If target consumers speak Spanish, Tagalog, or Mandarin, recruit in-language messengers. One size does not fit all in Real People Marketing (or any marketing).

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Real People Marketing solves an equity problem in marketing

Creative is not usually developed by anyone with a shared lived experience to the target consumer. So, relationships for brands are even more difficult to manufacture, because of subtle and unsubtle imperfections in voice and vernacular in their ads and posts. Real People Marketing solves for diversity and inclusion by placing the creative in the hands of the community itself – with guidance from the brand of course. Pepsi and Nivea received the most heat for tone-deaf campaigns as advertisers aped social media, but the list of offenders is long.

Real People Marketing will work because it IS working already

When brands engage in Real People Marketing, they are partnering with cultural insiders rather than manufacturing culture from scratch. So, campaigns are more likely to succeed, because brands are leaning into messages, moments, and messengers already succeeding. These messengers are not only the target audience, but they also have a perspective of what their followers want. Bank of Creativity’s One Minute Briefs is an outstanding example of this pent-up creativity.

People are the new line item in a modern media budget.

Data unlocked the ability to identify, credential, and recruit any consumer group. People are valuable media inside a paid media plan, email program, social channel, or creative campaign. People are not only an object; they are also a subject. A horizontal throughput to marketing not just a vertical discipline. Search, social, PR, CRM, and PEOPLE.

Marketers are at the end of a trend, not the beginning.

Every institution is decentralizing. Wars are fought with drones. Currencies are exchanged on blockchain. Presidential elections swing on social movements. Vaccine decisions are made through friend groups. We wrote “How Social Media Leads to a Less Stable World” in 2014. Everyone is susceptible to Real People Marketing. Just read the news about politics.

Real People Marketing is the great, great, great, great grandchild of marketing birthed by new media then web media then social media then influencer media. It represents the decentralization of marketing begun forty years ago, of which AI is the frontier.

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Are you in a relationship?

Marketers must now think outside-in (people-first) rather than the traditional inside-out (brand-first) approach. If you are not running Real People Marketing programs now, your brand is already behind.  You should be experiencing FOMO. It is time to get real.

BONUS READ – Jon Miller, CMO at Demandbase chats about the evolution of ABM in this webchat with MarTechSeries: