As we all consume the deluge of sponsored content across social media, we also bring with us some level of skepticism around the trustworthiness of these influencers. Consciously or not, there’s a constant conflict between knowing these personalities are being paid to talk about a product and the positive parasocial relationship we’ve built with them to that point.

A paper recently published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science explores one trend around this dynamic: deinfluencing. Deinfluencing is when a social media influencer makes organic, unsponsored content discouraging their audience from buying a specific product. The question these researchers wanted to answer was how that impacts customers and brands — and whether it hurts or helps the influencer. Focusing specifically on short, vertical videos and using a pilot study with over 1,400 participants, researchers found it does help influencer credibility, “enhanc[ing] influencer trustworthiness by reducing skepticism about their motives, which thereby strengthens consumers’ purchase intentions toward subsequently endorsed products.”

This shouldn’t be too surprising. An influencer signaling to audiences they’re not purely commercially motivated reduces skepticism about their motives which, in turn, encourages people to listen even more.

I think there are two major takeaways from this finding — one explicitly called out from the research and one I’m extrapolating.

The first is that companies shouldn’t hesitate to partner with influencers who do occasionally publish deinfluencing content. The report says, “The strong positive impacts … indicate that brands that shy away from working with influencers who share deinfluencing content are missing out. In developing these alliances, brands should work to build long-term relationships with influencers who have supported their offerings over time, even if they occasionally voice dissatisfaction with certain products.”

The second, and something not explicitly stated in the report, is that the mechanism identified by the researchers (that people trust you more when you demonstrate you're not purely commercially motivated) isn't unique to influencer marketing. It's another way of demonstrating the well-documented reality of how trust works between people, and between people and institutions.

Yes, I am making a little bit of a leap from the specific idea of deinfluencing to the overall idea of motivational authenticity; but marketing that never considers publicly sharing some humanity or some vulnerability is communicating something about their company — whether they want to or not.

That’s externally. Internally, marketing teams that only ever present a positive picture (hedging every data point, inflating every result, and presenting) every quarter as a success regardless of what actually happened) are also communicating something — something your stakeholders are probably pretty good at picking up — that marketing cares more about looking good than about being useful.

That same research paper mentions some outside findings that less than 35% of consumers trust influencer recommendations. That’s about the same percentage of CEOs who trust their CMOs (32%). The reasons may be different, but the dynamic isn't: when every message is promotional, the motivation is questioned and the messages stop landing. And maybe the solution is the same.

Marketing functions that are clear about what they're trying to accomplish, honest about what the data shows, willing to say that something didn’t work and why, and focused on business outcomes rather than their own recognition are communicating something different. They're communicating that they can be relied upon. And reliability is the thing marketing actually needs more of.

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